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THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS: 
IS IT SUFFICIENT? 



Dr. McCOSH'S WORKS. 

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New York. 



THE 



Development Hypothesis: 



IS IT SUFFICIENT? 



BY 



JAMES McCOSH, D.D., LL. D., 
n 

PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON COLLEGE. 



DjS^C 




NEW YORK: 

ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 
530 Broadway. 

l8/6. 

r 



ZBLz6B 

,fUr 



Copyright, 1876, 
By Robert Carter & Brothers. 



Cambridge : 
Press of John Wilson dr 5 Son. 



THE 

DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 



PAPER I. 

ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST THE 
DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 1 

I"N these days every educated man and woman has 
"*■ heard of development, of evolution, and of Dar- 
winism. Many are anxious to know what they are, 
whether they are established by scientific evidence, 
and what is their moral and religious tendency. In 
this paper, without entering into minute scientific 
details, I am to give a plain account of this new 
theory, addressed to those who have not leisure or 
opportunity to study the numerous and very com- 
plicated discussions on this subject. 

It is evident that evolution runs through all nat- 
ure : one thing comes out of another. Every object 
on the earth at this moment — say rain-drop, flake of 
snow, rock, crystal, jewel — has been formed out of 
pre-existing materials ; and when it has fulfilled its 
purpose and disappeared, it is not annihilated : its 
elements still exist and have to appear in a new 

1 This paper is to a large extent a reprint from a portion of an 
article which I furnished, in 1874, to a valuable and interesting work, 
"Wood's Bible Animals" (Bradley, Garrctson, & Co., Philadelphia). 



6 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

form. It is believed by men of science that the sun, 
earth, and planets may have been fashioned out of an 
original floating matter or star dust. The plant pro- 
ceeds from the seecl, the oak is the development of 
the acorn. Animals are the offspring of parents, and 
proceed from a germ. This is known to all, and is 
acknowledged by all. Some are carrying the doctrine 
much farther. They are discovering development in 
national wealth and in national occurrences. The Re- 
formation in the sixteenth century, the English Rev- 
olution of 1688, the American war of Independence, 
the French Revolution of 1790, all grew out of the 
circumstances in which the countries were placed, 
out of the abuses that existed, and the state of feeling 
abroad. There is evolution even in the advance of 
science : thus the discovery of the circulation of the 
blood revolutionized the whole of anatomy ; and it is 
expected that this theory of development is to be fol- 
lowed by a whole host of scientific consequences. 
The doctrine shows that there is a continuity in 
nature, — that the present is the child of the past 
and the parent of the future. 

The Scriptures teach a doctrine of evolution. " The 
earth was without form and void " (Gen. i. 2), and the 
forms of land, atmosphere, and sea came out of it. 
"And God said let the earth bring forth grass, and 
the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding 
fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself after his 
kind " (v. 1 1). So in regard to animals, " the waters 
brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every 
winged fowl after his kind;" and then "the living 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. J 

creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing and 
beast of the earth after his kind" (vs. 21, 24). Of 
man's body it is said, " The Lord God formed man 
of the dust of the ground " (ii. 7). 

But is there nothing but development ? Are ob- 
jects produced in this way and in no other ? That is 
the question for discussion. In answering it, we have 
to insist, in the first place, that development implies 
a previous matter out of which the thing is devel- 
oped. This matter must have properties which make 
it to act and evolve things out of itself. All but athe- 
ists acknowledge that this matter has been created by 
God. The development proceeds in so orderly and 
in so beneficent a manner that it seems to give evi- 
dence of the existence of a wise and good God. 

And may not the God who created matter at first, 
interpose to introduce new powers and new agents ? 
In particular, must there not be a creative act when 
plants appear, and when animals appear ? The an- 
cients were not agreed on this point, and their opinions 
were not of any value on the one side or the other, as 
they made no scientific investigation. Augustine, one 
of the greatest of the Fathers of the Church, thought 
that animals might come out of the slime of the earth, 
without any parentage, — always, he would add, by the 
power of God. But among scientific men in modern 
times, the accepted doctrine was that all plants came 
from a seed, all animals from a parentage. They 
knew that varieties were produced by circumstances, 
but they held that species were fixed. They allowed 
that climate, modes of life, and training could produce 



8 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

different breeds of horses ; but they maintained that 
the horse, as a horse, could proceed only from the 
horse. 

But there arose, from time to time, naturalists who 
denied the accepted doctrine. De Maillet, at the 
beginning of last century, maintained that animals 
originally formed in the waters which covered the 
world were transferred to the land when it emerged, 
and there suited themselves to their new positions 
and improved by external circumstances. Lamarck 
(a.d. 1801) started the theory that there was an inher- 
ent principle of improvement in plants and animals, 
and that external conditions working on this produced 
gradually variations of species, which gave rise to new 
species, genera, and orders. A great stir was made by 
the publication of " The Vestiges of the Natural His- 
tory of Creation" (1844), in which it was ingeniously 
argued that creation, as the author called it, took place 
according to law ; and, in particular, that a prolongation 
of the time of the development in the womb may give 
rise to a higher type. The work, not being scientific, 
did not meet with much acceptance with naturalists. 
But universal attention was called to the subject 
when, in 1858, Charles Darwin, a distinguished nat- 
uralist and a very careful observer, published his 
work, " Origin of Species by means of Natural Selec- 
tion, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the 
Struggle for Life." The title indicates the nature of 
the process by which species are supposed to be gen- 
erated. Certain individuals, by exertion or otherwise, 
get a peculiarity which suits them better to their 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 9 

position. These survive, while others perish ; and 
the peculiarity becomes hereditary, and goes down to 
their offspring. A struggle ensues, the strongest race 
prevails ; and, as a result of the whole, there is an 
advance in the forms of plants and animals. Let this 
go on, by small augmentations at a time, for millions 
of years or ages, and it is able to produce all the spe- 
cies and all the genera now on the earth. 

I would now state as clearly and as briefly as I 
can the arguments for and against the Development 
Theory. 

1. Looking to the flora and fauna now upon the 
earth, we find them distinguished by a unity of plan. 
For instance : the fins of fishes, the wings of birds, 
the fore-feet of reptiles and of mammals, all corre- 
spond to each other, and this when they are made to 
fulfil very different functions. It can be shown that 
the venation of leaves, the branches of trees, and the 
whole tree, take very much the same form. There 
are affinities between the lichen covering the bare 
rock and the oak shooting up toward the sky ; be- 
tween the polyp confined to one spot in a pool and 
the lion ranging through the forest. Now, we are 
impelled to seek for a cause of this. It can be ex- 
plained by supposing that the whole proceeded from 
a single germ or a few germs, which germ or germs 
may have risen under favorable conditions out of fa- 
vorably disposed inorganic matter. 

2. There has been a gradual advance in the geo- 
logical ages from lower to higher forms. There have 
been breaks, as might have been expected, in the 



10 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

series ; still, upon the whole, there has been progress 
from the first animal discovered, the unshapely Eozoon 
Canadense, up to the highest mammal. We are im- 
pelled to seek for a xause ; and, in doing so, we are 
obliged to suppose, either that there is a tendency in 
the very organism itself to rise to higher states, or 
that there is an elevation by a happy start or by a 
succession of immeasurably small additions, the gain 
being handed down from parent to child ; and, as 
those who are without the advantage disappear, and 
those who have it multiply, a new and better race 
becomes settled. A hill, we may suppose, is covered 
with evergreens ; a severe frost comes and destroys 
nine-tenths, and these the weaker of them ; only the 
stronger live, and these spread and shed their seed ; 
and in due time the whole hill is adorned with 
stronger and healthier trees. This may enable us 
to understand what has taken place in the geological 
ages. As new and trying circumstances arise, there 
is a struggle for existence ; the unfit disappear, and 
the fit survive ; and there is progress, upon the whole, 
through the long ages that have run their course. 

3. We can experiment on this' subject, and exhibit 
the changes produced both on plants and animals by 
artificial means. " It was the study of domesticated 
animals," says Professor Asa Gray of Cambridge, 
"that suggested the theory." Mr. Darwin has taken 
great pains to observe the variations produced on ani- 
mals by domestication, and on some of the more 
important plants by cultivation, and has published a 
work in two volumes, " On the Variation of Animals 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. I I 

and Plants under Domestication." He shows that 
animated beings are affected by shelter, by protec- 
tion from exposure, by climate, by food. He has 
been particularly successful in dealing with pigeons, 
showing that numerous and very diverse forms have 
all proceeded from one known source. His argument 
is that in these changes, produced by domestic care 
and made hereditary, we have an experimental exem- 
plification of the way in which variations and new 
races have been produced in the geological ages. 

4. There is a correspondence between the progress 
of animals in the geological ages and the growth of the 
individual, as revealed by embryology. " The chick in 
the egg assumes in succession the aspect of a fish, a 
snake, a bird of low degree, and finally the similitude 
of its parent. Even man possesses, at an early period, 
the branchial apertures of the fish, and assumes in 
succession the aspect of a seal, a quadruped, a mon- 
key, and a human being." x All this seems to prove — 
it is not easy to tell how — that the higher animals 
have passed through the lower forms before they have 
reached their present organization. 

5. It was seen, from the very starting of the theory, 
that it must, in the end, be applied to the genesis of 
man. Many persons otherwise favorable shrunk from 
this extension. But in 1870, Darwin, in his " Descent 
of Man," boldly declared that man was descended from 
some lower form ; and has shown that the brutes and 
man have many common qualities, not only in their 
bodily structure, but in their mental instincts and 

1 Winchell on " The Doctrine of Evolution, 1 ' p. 29. 



12 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

faculties, such as their social attachments, curiosity, 
memory: and he reaches the conclusion, — "There 
can consequently hardly be a doubt that man is an 
offshoot from the old-world Simian stem, and that 
under a genealogical point of view he must be classed 
with the Catarrhine division." (Part I. c. vi.) As man 
agrees with anthropomorphous apes, " not only in those 
characters which he possesses in common with the 
whole Catarrhine group, but in other peculiar charac- 
ters, such as the absence of a tail and of callosities 
and in general appearance, we may infer that some 
ancient member of the anthropomorphous sub-group 
gave birth to man." Mr. Darwin can carry our gene- 
alogy still farther back : " Man is descended from a 
hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed 
ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant 
of the old world," and would be classed amongst the 
Quadrumana. 1 " The Quadrumana and all the higher 
mammals are probably derived from an ancient 
marsupial animal, and this through a long line of 
diversified forms, either from some reptile-like or 
some amphibian-like creature, and this again from 
some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the 
past, we can see that the early progenitor of all the 
vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal with 
the two sexes united in the same individual, and with 

1 The Quadrumana or monkeys are subdivided into the Platy- 
rhina, with nostrils placed far apart and prehensile tails ; and Catar- 
rhina, with nostrils close together and non-prehensile tails. The 
former are confined to South America ; the latter are found exten- 
sively in the old world. The highest section of the monkeys, the 
anthropomorphous apes, belong to the Catarrhine division. 



THE LEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 13 

the most important organs of the body (such as the 
brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal 
seems to have been more like the larvae of our exist- 
ing marine Ascidians than any other form known." 1 
(Part II. c. xii.) 

To illustrate these points, we have had an immense 
number and variety of cases collected by Mr. Darwin 
and other naturalists, and detailed in books, in jour- 
nals, and the reports of scientific societies. It may 
be stated generally that there is no dispute as to the 
facts, which are admitted on all hands. The dis- 
cussion turns round the theory advanced to account 
for them. I am now to state the considerations urged 
on the other side. 

1. It is admitted that there are no facts — that 
there is not even a single fact — directly proving 
the doctrine. We have no experience of one species 
being transmuted into another. We do not see it 
taking place before our eyes. There is no trace of it 
in the historical ages. The vines found depicted in 
the tombs of Egypt, and the animals on the monu- 
ments, are of the same species as those now on the 
earth. History goes back three or four thousand 
years, but gives no record of a new species of plant 
or animal appearing. If thousands of years cannot 
create a new creature, it may be doubted if millions 
can. The geological ages do show us new species 
appearing ever and anon, but disclose no evidence of 

1 The Ascidians are a low order of the "shell fishes" or mol- 
luscs. They are like two-necked leather flasks, and are fixed on 
rocks. They somewhat resemble the Amphioxus or lowest fish. 



14 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

their being derived from the species previously exist- 
ing. Mr. Darwin has ingeniously constructed a long 
chain of descent from the ascidian to man, but he has 
not been able to catch one species changing into 
another at any one point. 

2. Darwinism is at best an hypothesis. Hypothe- 
ses are introduced in science to explain facts. They 
are to be propounded under very stringent restrictions. 
They are to be admitted only when they explain the 
facts. There must be no facts inconsistent with 
them. When an hypothesis explains the facts gen- 
erally, it may be admitted that there is some truth 
in it : but even then it may not be the whole truth ; 
it may require to be supplemented by some other 
considerations, and to take a form which entirely 
changes its bearing, scientific and religious. Tried 
by such tests, Darwinism is seen to be encompassed 
with many difficulties, and cannot be regarded as 
established. It certainly does not account for the 
whole phenomena, and there are facts inconsistent 
with it. There may be truth in it, and yet it may 
require to be greatly modified. 

3. It does not account for the whole of the facts. 
It can offer no explanation of the origin of the matter 
out of which animated beings are formed. In order 
to start, Mr. Darwin is obliged to postulate three or 
four germs, or at least one germ, created by God ; 
the admission is candid, and shows that in the last 
resort we have to call in something higher than evolu- 
tion ; in short, we have to call in God. The younger 
advocates of the theory are not satisfied with this ad- 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 15 

mission. Dr. Tyndall, in his Belfast address, opposes 
as strongly the creation of a few forms as of a multi- 
tude. Professor Bastian imagines that he has been 
able to produce animated life out of inanimate ; but 
scientific men, including Professor Huxley, set no 
value on his experiments. All our higher naturalists 
allow that there is no evidence at this present time 
of there being now, or of there ever having been, 
spontaneous generation. Some are cherishing the 
idea that there may have been life in the original 
matter, and continuing dormant for millions of years, 
till it came forth in animals under favorable conditions. 
We see to what far-fetches these scientific men are 
obliged to resort, to support an hypothesis of which 
it may be said that, instead of explaining things, it 
needs farther hypotheses to bear it up. Not satis- 
fied with all this, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Dr. 
Tyndall are obliged to fall back on an " inscrutable 
power " to account for the whole ; for the origination, 
the continuance, and the subsistence of all phenomena. 
Theists feel that they have a much stronger as well 
as a more comfortable ground when they rest all 
things on God, and reverently inquire into his mode 
of procedure, and what place natural selection may 
have in it. 

4. Mr. Darwin seems quite aware that evolution can- 
not explain every thing. He is obliged to call in not only 
original germs created by God, but in his later works 
pangenesis, to continue the life. Every living creature is 
supposed by him to possess innumerable minute atoms, 
named "gemmules," which are generated in every 



1 6 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

part of the body, are constantly moving, and have the 
power of reproduction, and, in particular, are collected 
in the generative organs, coming thither from every 
part of the body. "These almost infinitely numer- 
ous and minute gemmules must be included in each 
bud, ovule, spermatozoon, and pollen grain." (" Ani- 
mals and Plants under Domestication," vol. ii. 366.) 
It is not pretended that there is any proof of this ; it 
is an hypothesis brought in to support an hypothesis. 
A structure which needs such abutments is not so 
simple and sufficient as it seems to superficial ob- 
servers to be. 

5. It is admitted that there is a common plan run- 
ning through the whole vegetable and the whole 
animal kingdom ; but it does not follow that it is 
produced by natural selection, by the struggle for 
existence, and by heredity. The unity and the benef- 
icence of the plan show that it is the product of 
intelligence : plan, adaptation, and harmony seem to 
be indications of mind. The unity of nature is a 
proof of the operation of a divine arrangement. In 
fulfilment of his purpose, it is conceivable that God 
may act in one or other of two ways. Even as he 
created matter at first, he may, when the fit time 
comes, create plants and animals, or new species of 
plants and animals ; or he may carry on the whole by 
a secondary agency. Man may be able by a long 
process of laborious investigation, to find out what 
this agency is in whole, or more probably only in 
part. Part of it may be the struggle for existence 
and the law of heredity ; but it does not follow that 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 17 

this is the whole : " No man can find out the work 
that God maketh, from the beginning to the end." 

6. There are many breaks in the succession. Geol- 
ogy, and it alone — not history — shows us new spe- 
cies appearing, but discloses no ancestors from whom 
they could have been derived. But then it is said that, 
as the geological record is very imperfect, we may yet 
discover the intermediate links. To this all I have 
to reply is that, should these cast up, we must provide 
a place for them. But for the present we must suit 
our hypothesis to the facts ; and the facts show wide 
gaps in the succession. Haeckel would derive higher 
plants from algae or sea-weeds. " Nothing," says Dr. 
Dawson, " could more curiously contradict actual 
facts. Algae were apparently in the Silurian neither 
more nor less elevated than in the modern seas, and 
those forms of vegetable life which may seem to 
bridge over the space between them and the land 
plants in the modern period are wanting in the older 
geological periods, while land plants seem to start at 
once into being in the guise of club mosses, a group 
by no means of low standing. Our oldest land plants 
thus represent one of the highest types of that cryp- 
togamous series to which they belong, and, moreover, 
are better developed examples of that type than those 
now existing. We may say, if we please, that all the 
connecting links have been lost ; but this is begging 
the whole question, since nothing but the existence 
of such links could render the hypothesis of derivation 
possible." The same eminent palaeontologist assures 
us that " there are forms of. life in the Silurian which 



1 8 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

cannot be traced to the Cambrian, and which relate 
to new and even prospective conditions which the 
unaided powers of the animals of the earlier period 
could not have provided for." 1 Some eminent Ameri- 
can geologists favor the theory that, instead of an 
unbroken series, there is once and again the sudden 
and abrupt introduction of new species, — they cannot 
tell how, — the rapid elevation of them till they reach 
their highest capacity, when they remain stationary 
for a long period, and in the end decay and disap- 
pear. 

7. No argument drawn from changes produced by 
domestication can admit of a legitimate explanatory 
application to cases in which every thing must be 
done by unaided natural agency. By artificial means, 
man may produce changes which would never take 
place spontaneously ; and then it may be urged, and 
cannot be contradicted, that domestication has never 
produced a new species, either of plant or animal. 
The supposed new species thus originated have, when 
carefully investigated, turned out to be new varieties. 

8. All artificially produced varieties tend to return 
to their original state. The garden flower, when ne- 
glected, always tends to go back to the condition in 
which it was in the meadow or on the mountain. 
Domestic animals, cast out from human habitations 
and allowed to run wild, will, as they consort to- 
gether, become like what they were before they were 
brought under human care. 

1 Dawson's " The Story of the Earth and Man," pp. 77, 79. It is 
proper to mention that, in the geological history of the earth, the 
Silurian rocks succeed the Cambrian. 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 19 

9. Species can be made to cross ; but then the off- 
spring is not prolific, — at least, does not continue to 
be so. The crossing of the horse and ass gives us a 
very useful animal, the mule ; but mules do not pro- 
pagate their kind, and so cannot give us a new race. 

10. These two last circumstances seem to show 
that there is such a thing as fixed orders, genera, 
and species both in the animal and vegetable king- 
doms. It is acknowledged that there are fixed spe- 
cies — if we may adopt the term — in the mineral 
kingdom, such as the sixty-four elementary bodies. 
No one has been able to transmute metals into each 
other, say to transmute iron into gold. So, from 
whatever cause, there seem to be impassable divisions 
in the animal kingdom, as the grand division verte- 
brate and invertebrate, and the subdivision of the 
lower animals, the Protozoa, the Radiata (Ccelente- 
rata), the Mollusca, and the Annulosa. These fixed 
types give us the unity amid the variety, the stability 
amidst the mutability, by which our world is charac- 
terized. 

11. Astronomy does not allow sufficient time to 
geologists to generate all vegetable and animal life 
by means of natural law. Evolutionists require an 
enormous time to perform their work : they talk of 
millions and hundreds of millions of years. They 
need it, in order, by small gradations, to bring pro- 
toplasm up to the mammal, the ascidian up to man. 
But our earth formed out of the primary matter has 
been thrown off at a date which can be approximately 
determined ; and this, according to Sir W. Thomson, 



20 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

can amount to only a few millions of years, — a period 
not sufficient for the evolutionist theory. I do not 
set much value on this argument, for I do not believe 
we can calculate the earth's age with any thing like 
accuracy ; but the calculation of Sir W. Thomson has 
more solid data to go on than the speculations of evo- 
lutionists, and we may allow the one to counteract the 
other. 

12. If there be difficulties in showing how one spe- 
cies of plant or animal can be derived from another, 
these are immeasurably increased when we would 
produce man from the brutes. Mr. Alfred Russel 
Wallace, who started the theory of natural selection 
contemporaneously with Darwin, draws back at this 
point. He urges a number of very powerful objec- 
tions. (See Wallace s Natural Selection) There is 
the size of the skull. " We have seen that the aver- 
age cranial capacity of the lowest savages is probably 
not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civil- 
ized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes 
scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both 
cases taking the average. Or the proportions may be 
more clearly represented by the following figures : 
anthropoid apes, ten ; savages, twenty-six ; civilized 
man, thirty-two." He emphatically urges that sav- 
ages have a brain capacity not required by their 
wants, and which could not have been produced by 
their wants in the struggles of life. Mr. Wallace 
cannot understand how man if derived from the 
brutes should ever have lost the hairy covering on 
his back so necessary to protect from cold and expo- 



/ 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 21 

sures of various kinds, till his higher intelligence 
enabled him to do so otherwise. This starts the 
general difficulty : in respect of his power of shelter- 
ing or defending himself from physical evil, man is 
helpless compared with the highest of the lower ani- 
mals ; and how did it come that he was able to con- 
tinue while his mental powers were growing ? Mr. 
Darwin is obliged to admit that there is not now on 
the face of the earth, and that there has not been 
found in the geological ages, an animal from which 
man could have directly sprung. 

But the physiological differences are not after all 
the decisive dividing lines between man and the 
lower animals. His grand distinction is to be found 
in his mental and moral qualitities. There are such 
qualities to be found in all men, and in no brutes. 
You may detect them in the germ or in the norm, in 
the human infant and in the savage. The teacher 
draws them out in the child, and they are capable 
of indefinite growth. The missionary tries to rouse 
them in the savage, and partially succeeds. No one 
attempts to do this with even the noblest of the brute 
creatures, such as the elephant, the horse, or the dog. 
Man can perceive the essential' distinction between 
truth and error, between good and evil. He can form 
lofty abstract and general ideas ; carry on long pro- 
cesses of reasoning, as in mathematics ; construct 
far-reaching sciences, such as arithmetic, geometry, 
physics, astronomy, geology, psychology, and ethics. 
He can look back into the past and forward into 
the future, gathering wisdom from experience ; he 



2 2 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

can devise plans which are fitted to accomplish very- 
distant ends ; he can construct governments and set 
up political institutions. He dwells on lofty ideas of 
space and time and infinity. He believes in God, he 
worships God, and hopes for an immortality. In his 
bodily organization, he may be connected with the 
lower animals ; but in his spiritual nature he is formed 
in the very image of God. 

Looking to these facts and arguments, the candid 
and judicious mind will be apt to conclude : first, that 
extreme positions have been taken up, and rash asser- 
tions have been made by evolutionists ; but, secondly, 
that there is development in nature which can explain 
a vast body of phenomena, while it cannot explain 
every thing. 

And here I may remark, that I attach no value to 
the objections urged by those who demand that in 
order to believe in development we should perceive 
it with our eyes, that we should actually see one 
species coming out of another. The fact is, no law 
of nature falls, properly speaking, under the senses ; 
we can discern by the eye, ear, smell, taste, and 
touch, only individual phenomena, and we have to 
infer that they proceed from a law which is found to 
combine and in a sense explain them. Copernicus 
and Galileo could not furnish ocular demonstration 
of the movement of the earth ; nor could Newton of 
the law of universal gravitation. These men simply 
set before their contemporaries a theory which they 
showed, by well-established facts and careful calcula- 
tions, could account for the visible facts in a rational 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 23 

and satisfactory manner. Evolutionists will have es- 
tablished their hypothesis, when they can show that 
it meets the observed facts ; and this they are far 
from being able to do at this present time. Before 
universal evolution can be accepted as a scientific 
truth, it must be explained, limited, and made coinci- 
dent with observation. And, even when this is done, 
there are moral and religious truths which must be 
placed along side of it before we have a full view of 
our world and of man. 

It may be urged by those who oppose these new 
doctrines that we are to refer all these phenomena 
on which evolutionists so fondlv dwell to the will of 
God. The reply should be, So ought every man to 
do, so every religious man will do. But then God 
usually acts through secondary agents, these being 
all the while his own agents. That lily is undoubt- 
edly the work of God ; but it has been developed from 
a seed, and that seed from a parent plant. In the last 
century, when special attention began to be called to 
shells and bones in the soil and rocks of the earth, 
there were persons who thought it enough to say 
that these were created as they are by God when he 
made all things. But surely the earlier geologists 
might not be less devout, and were acting in a more 
reasonable way when they showed that these had 
once belonged to animals enjoying life, and speaking 
of the wisdom and benevolence of Him who made 
them. So we may in this later age, when it has been 
shown that these animals, while they bear affinities to 
existing animals, are yet not the same, may inquire 



24 ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST 

into the means by which both the older and later forms 
have been produced. Some are telling us that they 
believe in successive and progressive creations. But, 
if so, there is some law or rule or method in the 
creations ; and, suppose we have evidence that this 
method is development of one thing which God 
makes out of another thing which he has also made, 
our idea of the Divine wisdom would not thereby 
be diminished. 

There is an idea that these late discoveries in 
science may overthrow religion, natural or revealed. 
Some are glorying in this as relieving them from all 
religious restraints. Some are under deep apprehen- 
sions that they may thereby be deprived of their fixed 
faith and their encouraging hopes. What, it may be 
asked, is the feeling which the truth-loving Christian 
should cherish ? What the attitude he should take ? 
Let him accept the truths of science, so far as they 
are established ; let him not be captivated by theories 
which go far beyond the facts, and which may require 
to be modified and corrected before they are con- 
formed to the reality of things. Let him not in the 
mean time give up his faith in God's Word, which has 
such strong evidence in its favor, historical, moral, 
and experimental, and which has stood firm amid so 
many revolutions of science, which gives us a glimpse 
of the progressive work of creation three thousand 
years before geology was thought of, and uttered 
general predictions, as for instance regarding the 
scattering of the Jews, the rise of popery and its fall, 
— predictions which are being fulfilled before our 



THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 25 

eyes. There may be times when there seems to be 
a contradiction between science and religion, more 
frequently when we cannot see the reconciling link, 
just as there are times when we cannot see the con- 
sistency between two parts of a good man's conduct, 
or between the statements of two witnesses, both 
truthful. In these latter cases,, we wait for further 
light ; let us do the same when at any time there is a 
seeming incongruity between Genesis and geology, 
between God's word and God's works. 



26 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 



PAPER II. 

IS THE DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS 
SUFFICIENT? 1 

'THHIS Paper has been occasioned by the lectures 
-** of a distinguished Englishman who has visited 
this country ; but I am to keep very much to my gen- 
eral subject, and not enter upon a minute criticism of 
Professor Huxley. In these lectures, he has abstained 
from entering on those exciting topics bearing on 
materialism and religion, which he has discussed so 
freely in Edinburgh and in Belfast, and in his pub- 
lished writings. So far the hopes of unbelievers 
in Scripture, and the fears of timid Christians, and 
the rising rage of polemic theologians, have been dis- 
appointed. But an interest has been excited in the 
subject of development. In the present state of the 
public mind, good may arise from showing that when 
the doctrine of development is properly explained and 
understood, and kept within its legitimate sphere, 
there is nothing in it inconsistent with natural or 
revealed religion ; and that the scientific truths which 
Professor Huxley has expounded in these lectures do 

1 This Paper was written at the request of the editor of the 
"World " of New York, and appeared first in that paper and then 
in the " Popular Science Monthly." 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 2 J 

not entitle him to draw the consequences which he 
has done in his " Lay Sermons " and other writings. 

In his first lecture the professor had light work and 
an easy victory. He set up two targets and shot 
them down. He stated and overwhelmed two hypoth- 
eses : the first, that nature has been all along very much 
in the state in which it now is ; and the second, the 
poetical account given by Milton in " Paradise Lost." 
It did not need an Englishman to come 3000 miles, 
it did not require a man of Professor Huxley's knowl- 
edge and dialectic skill, to demolish these fancies. I 
cannot remember a single man eminent in science, 
philosophy, or theology, defending either of these 
views during the last half-century. The first hypoth- 
esis was never held by religious men, though it has 
been defended by a few scientific men — who might 
have been kept from error by looking to Scripture — 
such as Hutton, Playfair, and Lyell in his earlier 
writings. The book of Genesis speaks of an order 
and a progression in the origination of things, and of 
a flood covering the then peopled earth. I should not 
expect any one but a Don Quixote to attack Milton's 
exposition of a popular belief. The view given in 
" Paradise Lost" was not the one entertained by sev- 
eral of the most eminent of the Christian fathers, such 
as Origen, and has not been entertained by any 
theologian of ability and scholarship for the last age 
or two. It must now be forty or fifty years since 
Chalmers and Pye Smith and certain well-known 
divines of the Church of England, and President 
Hitchcock of Amherst, adopted the discoveries of 



28 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

geology and sought to reconcile them with Scripture. 
It is an instructive circumstance that, while Milton's 
account cannot stand a moment's investigation, the 
record in Genesis is believed by many of our highest 
men of science to be perfectly consistent with the 
latest science. I name only Professor Dana, Profes- 
sor Guyot, and Principal Dawson, the highest author- 
ities on this continent, and superior to Professor 
Huxley, not certainly in zoology, but in geology. I 
am quite ready to give up these two hypotheses to 
Professor Huxley, to hew and hack them (to use one 
of his own phrases) like Agag. 

The second lecture is written in his best manner. 
There is scarcely any thing in it that I am inclined 
to object to. He is no longer killing hypotheses 
which died a natural death long ago. He is arrang- 
ing his materials for the defence of the theory of 
Evolution. He has as yet only brought forward the 
cases which he acknowledges are not demonstrative 
of the truth of evolution, but are such as must exist 
if evolution be true, and which, therefore, are upon 
the whole strongly in favor of the doctrine of develop- 
ment. He makes a number of admissions. He allows 
that there are species which have continued unchanged, 
not only throughout all historical years, but all geo- 
logical ages. Cuvier has shown that the ibises, dogs, 
and cats depicted 3000 years ago or more on the 
monuments of Egypt are the same as those found in 
that country in the present day. The professor tells 
us that, in examining the rocks even of the cretaceous 
epoch, we find the remains of some animals, such as 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 29 

one of the lamp shells, the terebratula, the globigerina, 
which the closest scrutiny cannot show to be in any 
respect different from those which live at this present 
time. He thence argues that there is no intrinsic 
necessity in animal forms to change and to advance, 
as some sciolists assume. But he labors to prove 
that there are cases in which varieties have become 
species by reason of being suited to their surround- 
ings. He gives credit to Mr. Darwin for bringing in 
two great factors in the process of evolution: ''One 
of them is a tendency to vary, the existence of which 
may be proved by observation in all living forms ; 
and the other is the influence of surroundiug condi- 
tions upon what I may call the parent form, and the 
variations which are thus evolved." He adds : " The 
production of variations is a matter not at all properly 
understood at present. Whether it depends on some 
secret machinery — if I may use the phrase — of the 
animal form itself, or whether it arose from the influ- 
ence of conditions upon that form, is not certainly a 
matter for our present purpose." True, this may not 
be for the purpose of his lecture; but it must be 
cleared up before we can clear up the subject of 
development. The nature and laws of variations and 
the peculiar laws of heredity are at present shrouded 
in mystery. When we know more of them and of the 
forces at work, we shall be in a better position to de- 
termine whether varieties ever do become distinct 
species. 

The professor acknowledges that geology does not 
furnish decisive evidence of one form of life passing 



f 



30 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

into another. But then he claims that the geological 
record is not complete ; that much of what is written 
in stone has been effaced ; and that if it were complete 
it would show us the missing links. To equal him in 
candor, I admit that transitional forms are ever cast- 
ing up. My friend Hugh Miller, pointing to the 
specimens in his museum, admitted this so long ago 
as 1856 at the last interview I had with him a few 
months before his death. Prof. Huxley shows that 
in certain fields we have those transitions fully dis- 
closed. He dwells on the resemblances and the affini- 
ties between reptiles and birds, and refers to animals 
which have some of the properties of both. Thus 
there are birds that have teeth, and reptiles that have 
wings and can stand on their two hind legs. True, 
there are naturalists who maintain that the teethed 
bird is still a bird, and the archeoptrix a reptile, a 
variety, and not a transitional form. Still, such cases 
indicate a tendency on the part of the reptile to rise 
to the bird, and of the bird to retain properties of the 
reptile ; and natural selection and development alone 
can explain this. 

In his third lecture, he brings forward what he re- 
gards as a demonstration. In the case of Equus> 
embracing our horse, ass, and zebra, he is able, by 
means of the specimens gathered in the West by 
Professor Marsh, to discover the succession of horse- 
like forms which the hypothesis of evolution supplies. 
Pie goes back from the living horse through the like 
animals of the post-Tertiary in the Pliocene, middle, 
and earlier, on to the older Eocene formation, where he 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 31 

finds the orohippus. " There you have four toes on the 
front-limb complete, three toes on the hind-limb, a 
complete and well-developed ulna, getting forward to an 
equality of size with the radius, a complete and well- 
developed fibula apparently, though it is not quite cer- 
tain, and then teeth with their simple fangs. So 
that you are now able, thanks to these researches to 
show that, so far as our present knowledge extends, the 
history of the horse-type is exactly and precisely that 
which could have been predicted from a knowledge of 
the principles of evolution ; and the knowledge we 
now possess justifies us completely in the anticipation 
that, when the still older Eocene deposits, and those 
which belong to the Cretaceous epoch, have yielded 
up their remains of equine animals, we shall find first 
an equine creature with four toes in front and a rudi- 
ment of the thumb, then probably a rudiment of the 
fifth behind, and so by gradual steps, until we come 
to that five-toed animal in which most assuredly the 
whole series took its origin. That is what I mean, 
ladies and gentlemen, by demonstrative evidence of 
evolution." 

Suppose that we admit all that the lecturer claims 
on this subject : what then ? Have we thereby set 
aside any doctrine of philosophy or religion ? The 
Christian, even the Christian theologian, may say 
wisely : " Let naturalists dispute as they may about 
the derivation of plants and of the lower animals ; 
their hypotheses, arguments, and conclusions do not 
interfere with our belief that God is to be seen every- 
where in his works, and rules over all." It appears to 



32 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

me that the whole doctrine of vegetable and animal 
species needs to be reviewed and readjusted, and 
religion need not fear the result. I have been con- 
vinced of this ever since I learned, when I was ar- 
dently studying botany, that the number of species 
of plants had risen to two millions ! I was sure that 
all these are works of God ; but I was not sure that 
each was a special creation. 

When a new truth is discovered, especially when it 
is a reaction against an old theory, it is apt to bulk so 
largely in the view of those who hold it, that they 
carry it to extreme lengths, and it requires time and 
discussion to confine it to its own place. Thus, in old 
time, Thales, perceiving how much water could do, 
and Anaximenes how much air could accomplish, and 
Pythagoras how much numbers and forms could ac- 
count for, hastened to the conclusion that the whole 
operations of nature could be derived from them and 
explained by them. I am old enough to remember 
that the brilliant discoveries of Sir Humphrey Davy 
led wandering lecturers, and all sorts of sciolists, to 
affirm that they could explain all things, matter and 
mind itself, by electricity. So, in these days, develop- 
ment, having furnished a key to open so many of the 
secrets of nature, has led some to imagine that it can 
solve all the mysteries of the universe. Some of us 
may be inclined to admit, and to use for scientific 
purposes, the doctrine of development, and yet be 
prepared to deny that it can explain every thing. The 
fact is, it overlooks a great many more things than it 
notices. There are signs of a reaction among scien- 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 33 

tific men against its extreme positions ; and it is the 
work of the age now present to show how much de- 
velopment can do, and how much it cannot do. 

In the common apprehension of those who hold 
the development hypothesis, all that is necessary to 
account for the world in its present state is to sup- 
pose that, millions of years ago, there appeared — no 
one can tell how — a nebulous mass, with an incon- 
ceivably high temperature, but losing its heat, and 
ready to condense ; that in the long lapse of time 
it took the shape of planets, satellites, and sun ; and 
that on one of these planets — that on which we 
dwell — it formed into plants, animals, and, finally, 
man ; all by its own power, according to natural law, 
or, rather, the necessity of things ; without it being 
necessary to call in a God or a guiding providence, 
or to suppose that there has been a plan in a design- 
ing mind. All the defenders of the theory do not 
state this in express words, but it is the impression 
left by their expositions ; though some of them, such 
as Herbert Spencer and Tyndall, would save them- 
selves from the blank consequences by calling in an 
unknown and unknowable power beyond the visible 
phenomena, or by appealing to some religious feelings 
supposed to be deep in our nature, but which the 
theory would soon undermine, as being, in fact, un- 
justifiable and unreasonable. This is the view that 
I mean to meet. In examining this hypothesis, there 
are some things which I am willing to admit as being 
established truths : 

1. I hold the doctrine of the Conservation of 

3 



t 



34 JS THE DEVELOPMENT 

Force ; that is, that the sum of energy, real and 
potential, in the universe is always one and the same, 
and cannot be increased or diminished by human or 
mundane action. I was prepared for this doctrine 
when it was announced by Mayer, of Heilbronn, and 
by Joule, of Manchester, and expounded by Grove, of 
London. It seemed to me to follow from the doctrine 
which I had laid down in my first work — " The Me- 
thod of Divine Government," published twenty-six 
years ago — as to the material universe being composed 
of substances with properties or powers of which it 
cannot be deprived, and which cannot be added to 
nor lessened. It is this that secures the permanence 
of nature, keeping it unchanged in its power or pow- 
ers amid all changes of action. This energy, disap- 
pearing in one form, appears necessarily in another, 
and gives us what Spencer calls the " persistence of 
force." This ever-enduring force gives rise to devel- 
opment. Going out from one body, it is manifested 
in another. The fact is, all causation, all physical 
action, is evolution. The substances and powers in 
the agents acting as the cause are found, though in 
a modified form, in the effects. Proceeding on this 
very principle, Mayer says : " Forces are causes ; 
accordingly, we may in relation to them make full 
application of the principle causa equat effectum ;" and 
he thus elaborated the grand scientific truth, the most 
important discovered in our day, that the sum of 
energy in the universe is always the same. 

2. I admit that this power becomes more and more 
Differentiated ; that is, takes more and more diverse 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 35 

forms, and thus imparts an ever-increasing multi- 
plicity and variety to the universe, and will continue 
to do so till the diversity breaks it up, and " the 
heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the 
elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, 
and the works that are therein, shall be burned up." 
Mr. John S. Mill has been successful in showing that 
there is usually more than one antecedent or agent 
in a cause. " A man takes mercury, goes out-of- 
doors, and catches cold. We say, perhaps, that the 
cause of his taking cold was exposure to the air. It 
is clear, however, that his having taken mercury 
may have been a necessary condition of his catching 
cold ; and, though it might consist with usage to say 
that the cause of his attack was exposure to the air, 
to be accurate we ought to say that the cause was 
exposure to the air while under the effect of mercury." 
He concludes, " The real cause is the whole of these 
antecedents." Now, I hold that in physical nature 
causes are not only usually, but invariably, of this 
dual or plural nature. I go a step farther, and have 
shown, I think, that the effects are also of the same 
dual or plural character. The effect, in fact, consists 
of the same agents or substances as the cause, but 
now in a new state. A picture falls from a wall and 
breaks a table ; we say that the breaking of the table 
was the effect of the fall of the picture. But the true 
effect embraces both the picture and the table, the 
picture having lost its momentum, and the table 
being broken. It follows from all this that the new 
combination of agents, acting as the causes, must 



36 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

produce more and more varied effects, as the effects 
joining with other effects become causes, and ramify 
into branches and branchlets. The sum of the powers 
is one and the same, but they appear in an ever- 
increasing number and diversity of forms. The con- 
servation of force thus gives a unity to nature, while 
the mutual action and interaction give it its multi- 
plicity. I remember how deeply I was interested in 
that paper (I read it when it appeared) of Von Baer, 
in which he shows that in the germs of animals, as in 
the history of the production of animated nature 
through long ages, there are first greater unity and 
simplicity, and then specific varieties more and more 
divergent. 

3. I have never set myself, as too many religious 
men unwisely did, against the theory, first started, it 
would appear, by Kant, then elaborated by Sir Wil- 
liam Herschel and Laplace, and perfected, I believe, 
by a professor in Princeton College, that the mundane 
system may have been formed out of original matter, 
evolved according to the mechanical laws with which 
it is endowed, — first the outer planets, then the 
inner, and finally the sun condensed into the centre. 
This never appeared to me to be an irreligious doc- 
trine, though Laplace was unhappily a man without 
religion. 

4. Once more : I have ever stood up for a doctrine 
of Development. There is a development of one 
form of matter from another ; of one force from an- 
other. There is, as every one allows, a development 
of the plant and animal from the parent. I see noth- 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 37 

ing irreligious in holding that the bird may have been 
evolved by numerous transitions from the reptile, and 
the living horse from the old horse of the Eocene for- 
mation. An accumulation of powers, new conditions ' 
and surroundings, may, it is acknowledged, produce 
a variety which may become hereditary. Let us 
suppose that they can also, in rare cases of combina- 
tion, produce species : religion is not thereby under- 
mined, either in its evidences or in its essential 
doctrines. 

The question now arises and presses itself upon 
us : Can we by these acknowledged agencies explain 
the whole of the present state of the universe, with 
all its fitnesses, its harmonies, its beauty, its utility, 
its beneficence ? The development theory, in the 
narrow and exclusive form which it commonly takes, 
overlooks vastly more than it notices. In particular, 
there are four grand truths kept out of sight. With- 
out these, we cannot understand the Cosmos. When 
these are introduced, they bring God into his own 
universe, and fill it with life and love. 

1. God is present in all his Works, and acts in all 
their Actings. This is the religious doctrine. " By 
him all things consist." Paul, addressing the men of 
Athens, said : " For in him we live, and move, and 
have our being ; as certain also of your own poets 
have said, For we are also his offspring." This doc- 
trine may be so stated as to make it pantheistic. It 
is the one grand truth contained in pantheism, giving 
it all its plausibility, and making it superior to that 
bald theism which makes God create the world at 



t 



38 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

first, and then stand by and see it go. The doctrine 
can be so stated as to free it from all such tendencies 
on the one side or the other, so as to make God dis- 
tinct from all his works, and yet acting in them. 
This is, I believe, the philosophical doctrine. It has 
been held by the greatest thinkers which our world 
has produced, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, Berkeley, 
Herschel, Faraday, and multitudes of others. It 
seems to be required by that deep law of causation 
which not only prompts us to seek for a cause for 
every thing, but an adequate cause, to be found only 
in an intelligent mind. Our greatest American 
thinker, Jonathan Edwards (whom I can claim as my 
predecessor), maintains that, as an image in a mirror 
is kept up by a constant succession of rays of light, 
so nature is sustained by a constant forth-putting of 
the divine power. In this view, nature is a perpetual 
creation. God is to be seen not only in creation at 
first, but in the continuance of all things. "They 
continue to this day according to thine ordinances." 
He is to be acknowledged not only in the origination 
of matter, but in its developments ; not only in the 
reptile and the bird, but it may be in the steps by 
which the one has been derived from the other ; not 
only in the orohippus, but in the stages by which 
that animal has risen into the horse so useful to man. 

2. New Powers appearing in Nature. — Let us sup- 
pose that there was an original matter. I regard it 
as most in accordance with the principles of our 
reason to ascribe that matter to God. What prop- 
erties had that matter at first ? Every man of ordi- 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 39 

nary wisdom and modesty will be ready to answer, " I 
know not." If he does not know, he is not entitled 
to say that all things have proceeded from it. I sup- 
pose it will be allowed that it possessed gravitation. 
" This law of the inverse square," says a writer in the 
last number of the " Quarterly Review " (London), 
" is but the mathematical expression of a property 
which has been imposed on matter from the creation. 
It is no inherent quality, so far as we know. It is 
quite conceivable that the central law might have 
been different from what it is. There is no reason 
why the mathematical law should be what it is, except 
the will of the Being who imposed the law. Any 
other proportion would equally well be expressed 
mathematically and its results calculated. As an in- 
stance of what would occur if any other proportion 
than the inverse square were substituted as the attrac- 
tive force of gravity, suppose at distances 1, 2, 3, the 
attractive force had varied as 1, 2, 3, instead of the 
squares of those numbers. Under such a law any 
number of planets might revolve in the most regular 
and orderly manner. But under this law the weight 
of bodies at the earth's surface would cease to exist ; 
nothing would fall or weigh downward. The greater 
action of the distant sun and planets would exactly neu- 
tralize the attractive force of the earth. A ball thrown 
from the hand, however gently, would immediately 
become a satellite of the earth, and would for the 
future accompany its course, revolving about it for the 
space of one year. All terrestrial things would float 
about with no principle of coherence or stability ; they 



40 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

would obey the general law of the system, but would 
acknowledge no particular relation to the earth. It is 
obvious that such a change would be subversive of 
the entire structure and economy of the world." 

Much the same might be said of the chemical, the 
electric, and magnetic properties of matter. If they 
were among the original powers, there is proof of design 
in their adaptation to one another and to the matter 
of the universe. If they were not, then we have 
traces of a new power being introduced ; and for this 
we must look for a cause. We are not able to say 
how many the properties possessed by the original 
matter ; whether they were few or many. But in 
either case there is evidence of contrivance in their 
harmonious action and results. We see that there 
is an end proposed in the music that comes from the 
violin, and this whether it is brought forth from one 
string, as was done by Paganini, or from four strings, 
as is done by the ordinary performer. So in the 
orderly and beneficent action of nature there is proof 
of adaptation, whether we suppose the original prop- 
erties to be few or to be numerous. 

Though preservation is in a sense a continued 
creation, yet preservation differs from creation. In 
looking back on the history of the world, it is often 
difficult to tell as to a certain work to which of these 
two kinds of divine acts it belongs. We may not be 
sure, for example, as to a new form of plant or animal, 
whether it is a creation or simply a development ac- 
cording to law ; and I am not sure that religion gains 
by our taking one side or another. We cannot, we 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 41 

have seen, determine for certain what were the powers 
of nature that were working from the very beginning. 
But it is clear and sure that powers have appeared in 
nature from time to time which did not operate at 
first nor for long ages ; nay, if geology speaks truly, 
nor for millions of years. There may be two supposi- 
tions in regard to these powers. The one is that 
they were all along in the original matter ; that the 
star-dust had in it potentially not only gravitation 
and chemical affinity, but life, sensation, conscious- 
ness, intelligence, moral discernment, love. It is hard 
to believe that there was all this in that dull, heated, 
nebulous matter from which our world sprang. It is 
acknowledged that this mass must have existed for a 
long time — for hundreds of thousands, probably for 
millions of years — before life, and for a far longer 
time before intelligence, appeared. Whence did these 
new powers come ? If they were in the original mat- 
ter, how did it come that they were so long dormant, 
how that they at last appeared, it might be shown, at 
the appropriate time when surroundings were pre- 
pared for them ? Science can say nothing on this 
subject, and may never be able to say any thing. It 
is passing altogether beyond its province, passing 
from inductive proof into speculation, when it pre- 
tends to know any thing one way or other. Philos- 
ophy feels itself staggered when it would solve the 
problem. It does say, indeed, that this new operation 
must have had a cause. It is one of the certain laws 
of intelligence, one of the universal laws of experience, 
that every thing that begins to be must have a cause. 



i 



42 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

This law of causation takes several forms ; but every 
form will insist that these new operations must have 
come from a causal power. " Ex nihilo nihil fit " is a 
maxim going back farther than I am able to tell. The 
form given it by the great atheistic poet Lucretius 
is: — 

"... Nihil posse creari. 
De nihilo, neque quod, genitu est ad nihil revocari." 

Persius puts it : — 

"... Gigni 
De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti." 

Take either of these forms, or any form, and it in- 
sists that we seek a cause of the new kind of opera- 
tion. It cannot discover that there was any thing in 
that heated, vaporous matter to produce life and sen- 
sation, when they appeared millions of years after the 
world had begun to be formed. I will not decide 
dogmatically whether the causal action was natural 
or supernatural. Perhaps we are here come to a 
place where the distinction between natural and 
supernatural is lost in the dim distance. The cause 
may have acted according to a law. But in that case 
I must hold it to be a divine law. Even in the sup- 
position that it has been brought about by a conjunc- 
ture of circumstances, unknown for the indefinite 
period before, it must have been a providential junct- 
ure foreseen, nay, ordained by God. 

Life appears ten thousand ages or more after the 
earth began to form. Whence this life ? Professor 
Huxley seems to find it in some protoplasm or ge- 
latinous substance. Was this one of the original ele- 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFTCIENT? 43 

ments of the nebulous matter ? If so, how did it 
come through that terribly heated temperature ? If 
it did not exist till after the temperature had cooled, 
how did it come in ? Professor Huxley has been the 
most determined opponent in our day of the spon- 
taneous generation of life, and is thereby left without 
a means of generating the life of plants and animals. 
Darwin feels himself obliged, in order to account for 
the phenomenon, to suppose that there were three or 
four germs created by God. Tyndall thinks that Dar- 
win has at this point fallen into a weakness. But, 
meanwhile, Tyndall has no means whatever of ac- 
counting for the appearance of life. Mr. Darwin 
further calls in a pangenesis — which is just another 
name for the vital force of the older naturalists — in 
order to account for the generation of new animals. 
But he does not tell us, and evidently cannot tell us, 
whence this pangenesis, which cannot come from 
development, of which it is the source, and not the 
product. Herbert Spencer prefers to bring in physio- 
logical units. 

Whence comes sensation ? There was a moment 
when sensation pleasurable or painful was felt for the 
first time in the universe. Was this at the begin- 
ning ? If so, one wonders how the sentient sub- 
stance came through the heat, where, so far as we 
can judge, it must have been suffering intolerable 
anguish without the power of relieving itself by self- 
destruction. 

Had this protoplasm self-consciousness ? I rather 
think that neither Professor Huxley nor Professor 



44 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

Tyndall would say that it had. The language of 
Tyndall must needs be quoted once and again till he 
brings his system into accordance with it : " The pas- 
sage from the physics of the brain to the correspond- 
ing facts of consciousness is unthinkable." Mr. Fiske, 
the expounder of Spencerism in America, says {At- 
lantic Monthly, March, 1876): "Modern discovery, 
so far from bridging over the chasm between mind 
and matter, tends rather to exhibit the distinction be- 
tween them as absolute." He asks, " Does the motion 
of nerve molecules produce a thought or state of con- 
sciousness ? " He answers, " By no means. It simply 
produces some other motion of nerve molecules, and this 
in turn produces motion or contraction or expansion in 
some muscle, or becomes transformed into the chemi- 
cal energy of some secreting gland. At no point in 
the whole circuit does a unit of motion disappear as 
motion, to reappear as a unit of consciousness." Ani- 
mals from the very first have sensations, and also, at 
least the higher ones, ideas and very curious instincts, 
by which they make provision for coming evils of 
which they have no conception. Finally, in the last 
of the unnumbered ages we have man with his intelli- 
gence, his conscience and free-will, all attested by 
consciousness. Will evolutionists pretend that on 
any rational or inductive principle they can tell how 
these new powers came into being and into action ? 
When the book of Genesis tells us how these agen- 
cies did come in, and in particular how man appeared, 
science has and can have no facts to lead us to dis- 
credit it. 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 45 

3. There is Final Cause in Nature. — Laplace, a 
great mathematician, but not a great philosopher, im- 
agined that, when we have discovered an efficient, it 
is not necessary to seek for a final, cause. Aristotle, 
with a much more enlarged conception of the nature 
of the universe, maintained that we are to seek for 
both these causes, — and for two others besides, the 
material and the formal. The fact is that final cause 
presupposes efficient causes ; and the efficient causes 
effect, by their co-operation, the final cause. We 
argue final cause, that is, design, from the collocation 
of efficient causes to promote an evident end, say the 
ear to hear and the eye to see. The doctrine of 
development does not undermine or in any way inter- 
fere with the argument from design. This was as- 
serted by Hugh Miller when the "Vestiges of 
Creation " was published, is allowed by Professor 
Huxley, and has been gracefully illustrated and de- 
fended by Professor Asa Gray in his pleasant book, 
" Darwiniana." When we argue that a watch has 
had a maker, we do not suppose it necessary that 
the watch should have been made by an immediate 
fiat of the mechanic. We so infer, because we dis- 
cover agents combined to produce a particular effect ; 
and the combination of these may have taken days or 
weeks of patient labor. So, the fact that the present 
adaptations and forms of the plant and animal may 
have been produced by a great number of antecedents, 
acting through ages, does not show that there is no 
design, but rather proves that there has been a bounti- 
ful end contemplated all along, and effected by a long 



46 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

process. Professor Huxley, in the opening of his last 
lecture, has expressed his admiration — an admiration 
with which I thoroughly sympathize — of the struct- 
ure of the horse:- "The horse is in many ways a 
most remarkable animal, inasmuch as it presents us 
with an example of one of the most perfect pieces of 
machinery in the animal kingdom. In fact, among 
mammalia, it cannot be said that there is any locomo- 
tive so perfectly adapted to its purpose, doing so 
much work with so small a quantity of fuel, as this 
animal, the horse." He speaks of the beauty of the 
animal arising " from the perfect balance of his parts 
and the rhythm and perfection of their action. Its 
locomotive apparatus is, as you are aware, resident in 
its slender fore and hind legs, which are flexible and 
elastic levers, capable of being moved by very heavy 
muscles. And, in order to supply the engines that 
work these levers — the muscles — with the force 
they expend, the horse is provided with a very 
perfect feeding apparatus and very perfect digestive 
apparatus." In all these things being provided, — 
the phrase used by Huxley, though he has no 
right to use it, — there is evidence of purpose ; 
and this is not diminished, but rather increased, by 
the fact that the animal has been thus perfected by a 
long descent from an ancient progenitor. The argu- 
ment of Paley, and of the Bridgewater Treatises, 
derived from the bones and muscles of animals, and 
from the adjustments in every part of nature, is as 
valid and convincing as ever. I discover adaptation 
and contrivance, not only in the products but in the 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 47 

very process of development. Viewed in this light, 
development may, in the hands of a new Paley, furnish 
further and very striking cases of design. For, in 
order to the success of the process, there is often 
need of co-ordinated structure, that is, of a structure 
in which a number of parts are adapted to each other. 
My friend Mr. Joseph J. Murphy has supplied us 
with an instance in the case of the two nervous con- 
nections of the iris of the eye : " One of its nerves 
has its root in the brain, and contracts the pupil 
under the stimulus of light ; the other has its root in 
the sympathetic ganglia, and opens the pupil again 
when the intensity of light is diminished. It is 
obviously impossible that the efficiency of either 
of these two nerves could be increased sepa- 
rately ; they will not be improved at all unless 
they are improved together ; and this, on Dar- 
win's principles, can only be done by means of ac- 
cidental favorable circumstances occurring in both 
at once. But such coincidences are so improbable 
that they may be left out of account as if they were 
impossible." I do not agree with Mr. Murphy in 
thinking that such an instance tells against Darwin : 
but I think the coincidence shows a preordained ar- 
rangement ; and such coincidences are found in nearly 
every case of development, thus showing the need of 
co-operation and contrivance in the very developing 
process. It is to be observed that evolution, vegetable 
and animal, and natural selection, are not simple prop- 
erties of matter like gravitation and chemical affinity. 
They imply the concurrence of an immense number 



48 TS THE DEVELOPMENT 

of agents, mechanical, chemical, electric, galvanic ; 
and Darwin adds pangenesis, and Spencer physiolo- 
gical units. In the concurrence and co-operation of 
all these to develop the plant and animal, I see proof 
of purpose ; and, in the culmination of the whole in 
the perfect forms of the higher animated beings, I 
discover a guiding intelligence which designed the 
end from the beginning. 

4. There are Typical Forms in Nature. — It is now 
twenty years since, in conjunction with Dr. Dickie, I 
wrote " Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation," 
in which I showed that there was not only final cause, 
but a formal cause, a designed general order in nature. 
When I composed that work, I was filled with admira- 
tion of the discoveries made by Goethe and Oken, by 
Owen and Agassiz, as to the beautiful "forms" in 
nature. Some may think that the more recent doc- 
trine of development has made that treatise, or rather 
the whole doctrine on which it proceeds, obsolete. I 
admit that these late discoveries might require me 
in some places to change my mode of expression ; 
and the time has scarcely arrived for rewriting that 
book, and will not arrive till Darwin's doctrine and 
Owen's doctrine are more thoroughly adjusted. But, 
meanwhile, the argument is as valid as it ever was, 
and proves that there are designed order and beauty 
in nature ; the design being not less evident because 
the order and beauty have been brought about by a 
process of development. This has been shown fully 
and satisfactorily by St. George Mivart, in a recent 
article (Nov. 1875) in the Contemporary Review, 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 49 

entitled " Likenesses or Philosophical Anatomy," in 
which he writes in the same way as I did of homologies, 
and shows that many of these cannot be explained by 
development or by a descent from a common parent- 
age. He shows that " there are likenesses between 
different animals and different parts of the same 
animal which a theory of common descent cannot 
explain." " A very obvious example of likeness, not 
explicable by descent, is the familiar one between our 
right hand and our left. This likeness is part of that 
general correspondence which exists between the right 
and left sides of most animals, and which is spoken of 
as ' bilateral symmetry,' or lateral homology. Another 
example is that likeness which sometimes exists be- 
tween parts placed one above another, as between the 
upper and lower parts of the tail-fin of most fishes. 
Such likeness is an example of 'vertical symmetry/ 
or vertical homology. Another kind of likeness or 
homology is termed ' serial.' It is chiefly in our limbs 
that this kind of homology is manifested externally in 
us, but it is plainly enough to be seen in the human 
skeleton (or in that of any backboned animal), in the 
ribs, or in that series of generally similar bones, verte- 
bras, which make our vertical column or backbone. 
Our limbs, however, do present, even externally, a 
certain degree of similarity, — the thigh, leg, and foot 
of the lower limb evidently more or less repeating the 
upper-arm, arm, and hand of the upper limb." He 
traces like order in the lower creatures : " What can 
be more wonderful than the symmetry of those lowly 
but beautiful organisms the Acanthometrce, — a sym- 

4 



50 IS THE DEVELOPMENT 

metry for which it is difficult to conceive any external 
cause. Hardly, if at all, less wonderful is the radial 
symmetry of the Echinoderms (the sea-stars, sea- 
eggs, and sea-urchins)., with their multitudinous variety 
of component parts." 

So I feel myself at liberty to dwell, as I used to do 
so fondly, on the correspondences among the parts of 
plants. We may still notice with admiration how the 
leaf, sepals, pistils, and stamens are all after the one 
type, variously modified. We may observe and meas- 
ure the correspondence of the venation of the leaf, 
and the tree on which it grows ; of the tree, as a whole, 
and its separate branches. It is interesting to dis- 
cover that the tree which has an unbranched stalk 
for some distance above the ground, has a leaf with 
a bare leaf-stalk of the like relative length ; and that 
trees branched from the root have no petiole or bared 
leaf-stalk. 

All these are cases of correspondence not explicable 
by " descent." It seems that Professor Ray Lankester 
has introduced terms to distinguish between uninher- 
ited resemblance and resembling parts on the one 
hand, and inherited resemblance and resembling parts 
on the other : the former he designates " homoplasy " 
and " homoplast," and the latter " homogeny " and 
" homogens/' Now I am inclined to go a step beyond 
Mr. Mivart, and to argue that there is design in ho- 
mologies which may have been produced by descent, 
as where we see the pectoral limb of the horse, the 
whale, the bird, the fish ; whether fore-leg, paddle, or 
"wing, or fin, — formed on one type, though turned to 



HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 



51 



very different uses. All that Owen and Agassiz have 
said about the anticipations and prophecies in nature 
may be acknowledged as true, even by those who 
hold that they have been produced by development. 
Professor Huxley has been called the " Owen-crusher ;" 
but he has not been able, and I believe never will be 
able, to crush the doctrine which Owen established 
about the homologies of the animal frame. Agassiz's 
pupils have abandoned him in the opposition which 
he offered to the development theory ; but some of 
them may yet see that there was profound truth in 
what he said about the predictions in nature. I do 
believe that these old horse-like forms were prepara- 
tions for the noble and useful horse now living, and 
this whether the process has been one of creation or 
development. The efficient cause may have been 
development, but the formal cause (to use Aristotle's 
phrase) is the perfected animal ; and Bacon is right 
when he places the formal cause at the apex, and 
represents it as carrying us nearest to God. I am 
sure that the herb yields seed, and the fruit-tree 
yields fruit, and every living creature its young " after 
his kind." 

Mr. Mivart seems to attribute the correspondences 
not produced by descent to " an internal force," " a 
single form or force." I am inclined to refer them to 
a disposition designed of forces to produce a contem- 
plated end, operating everywhere, and co-operating. 
These combined agencies effect like results among 
very different objects. We see branchings in the 
old club-mosses and the sea-weeds, in anticipation of 



52 DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS. 

the more perfect ramification in the tree. We notice 
flowers radiating like the shell-fish which come at a 
later date. Insects have wings, prophetical of the 
better wings of birds. In the reptilian ages, we 
have monsters standing upright, and foretelling the 
erect form of man. There are thus in nature not only 
material causes, but final ; not only efficient, but for- 
mal. We cannot allow this evolution doctrine to shear 
nature of its grandeurs ; nor, we may add, morality 
of its binding obligations, or the universe of its God. 
Mr. Mivart concludes : " The teaching of what we 
believe to be true philosophy is, that the types shad- 
owed forth to our intellects by material existences 
are copies of divine originals, and correspond to pro- 
totypal ideas in God." 






GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 53 



PAPER III. 

GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

nrHE views presented in the Second Paper seem 
-*• to me to bring nature and revelation, geology 
and Genesis, into harmony. 

The Book of God begins at the beginning, with 
Genesis, the generation of all things. Science does 
not seem to tell us of a beginning. The Bible opens, 
" In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth." The account that follows is not to be re- 
garded as a scientific one, in the nomenclature of 
biology and geology, — sciences which did not exist 
till within the last century or two, and the scientific 
distinctions of which could not have been understood 
by those who lived in Moses' day, nor by the great 
body of the Bible readers in our day. It may be 
looked on as an ocular description, such as might have 
been given by an intelligent observer as he witnessed 
the unfolding scenes. It declares that there was an 
order and a progression in the generation, and it 
expresses the epochs by the word " day." When that 
word is first used, it could not apply to a day regu- 
lated by the sun ; for the sun had not appeared. In 
the very first unequivocal use of the phrase (Gen. ii. 4), 
it is used to denote an epoch, " These are the genera- 
tions of the heavens and of the earth, in the day that 



54 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

the Lord made the earth and the heavens," where 
there may be some significance in the circumstance 
that the earth is mentioned before the heavens. In 
some Books of Scripture the word is used almost as 
frequently to denote a period or an era as a day of 
twenty -four hours. Thus: Ps. xxxvii. 13, "for he 
seeth that his day is coming ;" 2 Pet. iii. 12, "hasten- 
ing to the coming of the day of God;" Rev. ix. 15, 
" which were prepared for an hour and a day." Crea- 
tion which begins at the beginning goes on by days 
and epochs. 

First Day. The earth is " without form," without 
the order which it subsequently assumed ; and "void," 
that is, without inhabitant. Is not this the nebulous 
period of Laplace, and the azoic period of geologists ? 
But the wind of God moves on the mass, light ap- 
pears, the forming work has begun, and there is an 
alternation of light and darkness. 

Second Day. There is now a separation of the 
lighter matter from the grosser, of the aerial and 
watery expanse from the earth proper ; just what we 
might expect from natural law. 

Third Day. There is a separation of the sea from 
the land. Life appears, and we have grass and trees. 
The earliest fossil known to us is an animal, the 
Eozoon Canadense. But it is acknowledged that 
animals presuppose vegetables ; and Dr. Dawson 
finds traces of vegetable matter in the Laurentian 
rocks to which the Eozoon belongs. 

Fourth Day. Hitherto, the sun and moon have not 
been seen as formed bodies. On the fourth day, our 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 



55 



observer notices them, and they become dividers of 
time and regulators of seasons. All this is in accord- 
ance with science, which tells us that the earth is older 
than the sun, and that there must have been light 
before the sun was condensed into its present form. 

Fifth Day. Let us look here at the literal transla- 
tion supplied, apart from any geological theory by a 
Hebrew scholar, Dr. Murphy, in his " Commentary 
on Genesis," chap. i. 20. " Then said God, Let the 
waters abound with the crawler that has breath and 
life, and let fowl fly above the earth upon the face 
of the expanse of the skies. Then God created the 
great fishes and every living breathing thing that 
creepeth, with which the waters abounded after their 
kind, and every bird of wing after its kind ; then saw 
God that it was good. Then blessed them God, say- 
ing, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the 
seas, and let the fowl multiply in the land. Then 
was evening, then was morning, day fifth." God here 
calls forth creatures that have breath, soul, — the psy- 
che of Aristotle. He calls forth swarming crawling 
creatures in the waters, creatures with wings to fly 
above the earth. As this decree is executed, there 
come forth, as Dr. Murphy explains, " long creatures, 
a comprehensive genus, including vast fishes, ser- 
pents, dragons, crocodiles," the root of the word being 
stretch. There appear, also, " the breathing thing that 
creepeth," and creatures with wings. 

Sixth Day. " Then said God, Let the land bring 
forth living breathing thing after its kind, cattle, and 
creeper, and beast of the land after its kind. Then 



56 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

made God the beast of the land after its kind, and 
the cattle after their kind, and every creeper of the 
soil after its kind." Here three orders of animals 
are mentioned, — cattle for man's use, small animals 
(mammals), and beasts of the field. 

Professor Huxley subjects the Bible account in the 
form of the Miltonic version to a captious criticism. 
According to Genesis, land animals appear on the 
sixth day, but in the coal-fields, which should be re- 
ferred to the fifth day, there " are numerous insects 
allied to our cockroaches, and scorpions of large size." 
But I should think that the language employed regard- 
ing the productions of the fifth day, the " crawlers " 
and " long creatures," would cover these animals, all 
of which, like the other animated beings of that geo- 
logical epoch, have strong affinities with water. In 
looking at the collections relating to the carboniferous 
formation, the most prominent figures are Dendrerpe- 
ton, the batrachian, and other amphibious creatures. 
I believe the account in Genesis to be a general de- 
scription of the characteristics of the epoch ; and it 
would not be discredited, though some terrestrial ani- 
mals were found in the coal-measures. It is acknowl- 
edged on all hands that no mammal comes so early. 

He specially objects to birds appearing on the fifth 
day ; for, being terrestrial animals, they should have 
been deferred to the sixth day. "As a matter of 
fact, we know not the slightest evidence of the exist- 
ence of birds before the Jurassic and perhaps the tri- 
assic period." But let us carefully note the language 
employed by the inspired writer, it is " every fowl of 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 57 

wing." My friend, Professor Hawkins, calls my atten- 
tion to Lev. xi. 4, where like language is used, " All 
fowls that creep, going on all four, shall be an abomi- 
nation unto you ; " that is, shall be unclean, unfit for 
food and sacrifice. This language would not apply to 
birds proper (with feathers), which do not go on all four, 
but such creatures as the pterodactyles, which did ap- 
pear at that time. Thus, Moses, though professing to 
give only a general description, specifies the very era, 
the fifth day, at which winged animals appear. These 
pterodactyles have many affinities with birds, properly 
so called, who came forth subsequently, by creation 
or development ; both have hollow bones filled with 
air and not with marrow. Huxley talks sneeringly of 
the flexibility of the language of the first chapter of 
Genesis. That language has stood there unchanged 
for three thousand years, while geology has to modify 
its generalizations from age to age. I have noticed 
that when theological writers can be induced to stick 
to the literal account in Genesis, and scientists to the 
pure facts, that the two records have a very wonder- 
ful correspondence. 

Our lecturer starts another difficulty : " Not one sol- 
itary species of fish now in existence is to be found in 
the carboniferous rocks ; and hence you are introduced 
again to the difficulty, — the dilemma, that either the 
creatures which were created then, which came into 
existence the sixth day, were not those which are 
found at present, or are not the direct and immediate 
predecessors of those which now exist ; but, in that 
case, you must have either had a fresh species, of 



58 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

which nothing has been said, or else the whole story- 
must be given as absolutely devoid of any circum- 
stantial evidence." This difficulty may seem to press 
heavily upon those who affirm that one species of fish 
cannot be derived from another ; but they extricate 
themselves from it by declaring that, while Genesis 
tells of the original creation of fishes, there may have 
been subsequent creations of which it gives no ac- 
count. It does not seem even to bear on those who, 
while they trace all things to God, do not deny that 
the fishes now in the seas may have sprung from 
those originally created. 

But we are most concerned with what, after all, is 
the most important to us, the creation of man. There 
is a twofold record, the parts not contradictory but 
complementary the one of the other. Gen. ii. 7 : 
" And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life, and he became a living soul." This is expanded 
in a passage full of meaning, which those opposed to 
development in every form would do well to ponder: 
Psalm cxxxix. 15, "My substance was not hid from 
thee when I was made in secret and curiously wrought 
in the lowest parts of the earth," opening glimpses of 
a process and a preparation ; " thine eyes did see 
my substance being yet imperfect, and in thy book all 
my members were written while yet there was none 
of them." Such is the one side, the animal side. 
But then we have the other side, chapter i. 26 : " And 
God said, Let us make man in our image, after our 
image, after our likeness. So God created man in 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 59 

his own image, in the image of God created he them." 
All this corresponds to our experience. We feel that 
we have an animal part cleaving to the dust, and 
allying us to the brutes. But we feel also that we 
have a divine nature, a power of distinguishing be- 
tween good and evil, a longing for something higher, 
a seeking after God. The Bible tells, thirdly, that 
this image of God has been defaced. These truths 
have been combined in an eloquent passage by the 
profound Pascal : "The greatness and the misery of 
man being alike conspicuous, religion, in order to be 
true, must necessarily teach us that he has in himself 
some noble principles of greatness, and at the same 
time some profound source of misery. . . . The phil- 
osophers never furnish men with sentiments suitable 
to these two states. They inculcated a notion 
either of absolute grandeur or of hopeless degra- 
dation, neither of which is the true condition of 
man. ... So manifest is it that we were once in a 
state of perfection from which we are now unhappily 
fallen. It is astonishing that the mystery which is 
farthest removed from our knowledge — I mean the 
transmission of original sin — should be that without 
which we can have no true knowledge of ourselves. 
It is in this abyss that the clew to our condition takes 
its turnings and windings, insomuch that man is more 
incomprehensible without this mystery than this mys- 
tery is incomprehensible to man." 

Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is still in great difficul- 
ties as to the application of development to the genesis 
of man, and has avowed this in his opening address 



-P 



60 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

as President of the Biological section of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science (1876). 
First, there is the size of the earliest discovered 
human brains, those of Engis and Cro-Magnon ; the 
former, according to Huxley, being " a fair average 
human skull, which might have belonged to a philos- 
opher ; " and the latter described by Wallace as being 
unusually large and well formed. Secondly, there is 
the nature of the works of art found in even the oldest 
cave dwellings, such as " scrapers, awls, hammers, 
saws, and lances, implying a variety of purposes for 
which these were used, and a corresponding degree 
of mental activity and civilization." He refers to 
hundreds of stone images, found in the remote islands 
of the Pacific, often thirty or forty feet high, with 
crowns on their heads ten feet in diameter, and to the 
ancient mounds and earth-works of the North Ameri- 
can continent, including camp enclosures, often of 
geometric forms, with roads and avenues miles in 
length, and with pottery and metallic articles. Every 
one has heard of the cyclopean walls of the old Eu- 
ropean nations, and of the ruins found in the 
cities of Central America, indicating that the existing 
race of Indians had been preceded by a distinct and 
more civilized people. He calls attention to that 
greatest of historical puzzles, the great pyramid of 
Egypt, whose form, dimensions, structure, and uses 
have been so elaborately examined by Professor Pi- 
azzi Smith, who has pointed out such nieasurings, 
angles, and levels, as imply, at a very old historical 
period, the highest science, architectural and geodet- 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 6 I 

ical. " The vertical height of the pyramid bears the 
same proportion to its circumference at the base as 
the radius of a circle does to its circumference." We 
are not at the bottom of this well which has been 
opened. We are introduced to a kind of life earlier 
than the savage state into which so many nations subse- 
quently fell. It is very much like that state, of society 
which is described in the Book of Genesis as existing 
before the Flood and after the Flood, where we read 
of artificers in the metals, and of towers, such as 
that of Babel, rising to heaven. These well-formed 
brains have left behind works worthy of them. These 
very ancient facts seem to combine with Scripture in 
testifying that there was something very peculiar in 
the first appearance of man, who, while formed of the 
dust of the ground by a curiously wrought process, 
was all the while created in the image of God. 

Two extreme views have been taken of the char- 
acter of our world : — 

One, that it is without wisdom or design or good- 
ness, the sport of Chance, or bound in the grim grasp 
of Fate. Those who favor this view dwell with pain, 
or with pleasure, on the disorders which they see 
everywhere : on the elements warring with each other ; 
on wind tossing wave, and the storms destroying the 
works of man and the useful products of the earth ; 
on the cross-purposes, the mishaps, the disappoint- 
ments, in our lot ; on the cruel pains, separations, and 
calamities which befall us ; on the infirmities, disease, 
and death, which attack our bodily frame ; on the 
oppression of the weak, the helplessness of unpro- 



62 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

tected orphans, and the wailings of widows ; on the 
ingratitude for favors exhibited by mankind ; on their 
deeds of deceit, betrayal, and vengeance ; on the 
wicked prospering, and the good defeated, — and they 
affirm .that a world so full of such scenes cannot have 
come from an all-mighty, an all-wise, or an all-good 
God. These were the facts persistently put in the 
front by the ancient sceptics ; and, in modern times, 
they so impressed the two Mills, father and son, that 
they could discover no unequivocal proof of the exist- 
ence of a God of infinite power, and were not disposed 
to believe in a Deity whose power is so limited that 
he cannot prevent the evil. Doubts arising from the 
same damps and vapors have so beclouded the vision 
of many not wishing to be sceptics, and not pro- 
fessing to be philosophers, that they have hid from 
their view the sun that shines in these heavens. 

On the other hand, there are some who see nothing 
in our world but order and beneficence. They fondly 
dwell on the fitness seen in every part of the plant 
and animal, and especially in our bodily frame ; on 
the revolving seasons, and abounding health and hap- 
piness ; on the pleasures thrown open to us in our 
homes, — how dear the word ! — in friendships and 
the social circle ; and the means of instruction afford- 
ed by schools, colleges, and churches. Science has 
confirmed these views by establishing the universal 
reign of law ; and those who are instructed in its har- 
monies delight to think and speak of the regular 
movement of sun, moon, and stars, of the formation 
and growth of worlds, and the development of vege- 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 63 

table and animal. It is the theme illustrated in the 
many works written in our language on natural theol- 
ogy. Every grateful heart will think and speak and 
sing of the goodness which has followed us all our 
lives, and has been turning what was seemingly evil 
into a blessing. 

But does either of these views, taken by itself, 
account for the whole facts ? As against the one, we 
have beauty and bountifulness pressing themselves 
on us so that we have only to open our eyes to behold 
them in heaven and earth, in revolving seasons and 
unfolding providence. But our world certainly pre- 
sents another and a very different aspect. Sin and 
pain are also in our world, and force themselves upon 
us whether we will or no. Whatever else is true, this 
is true also. How it may have become so we may 
not be able to tell. The how is a very difficult ques- 
tion on all subjects. The man of science is often tell- 
ing us the fact is so and so, but has to add, " How 
it is so I am not able to say." The profound 
theologian, Augustine, has put the question, " Where 
is evil, and whence comes it, since God the Good 
hath created all things ? " To this our Quaker poet 
answers, simply but wisely : — 

" No victory comes of all our strife ; 
From all we grasp the meaning slips ; 
The Sphinx sits at the gate of life, 
With the old question on her awful lips." 

There is certainly evil in our world. This is a fact 
quite as sure as any fact that we can specify in 
science or in practical life. That there is evil is 



64 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

quite as certain as that there is good. We have as 
clear and decided proof of the existence of the one 
as of the other. There is pain in our world, and this 
is certainly an evil, — pain often keen and long-con- 
tinued, lasting for hours and days and years, without 
the possibility of alleviation ; and the sufferer has to 
say in the evening, " When shall it be morning ? " and, 
in the morning, "When shall it be evening?" There 
is the deeper evil of sin, of ingratitude, unfaithful- 
ness, deceit, malignity. Whatever else is true, this is 
true also, — that we have sinned. We feel it in our- 
selves : we take guilt to ourselves, being convicted by 
our own consciences. We have to resist the evil in 
others. No explanation, no history of our world, is 
adequate, at first sight or at last sight, which does not 
look at and embrace both classes of facts. 1 

On the one hand, there are order and beneficence. 
These press themselves on the notice of every one, 
unlearned as well as learned. Science has succeeded 
in showing that beneficent law reigns in all know- 
able space and time : the same substances are found 
in sun and distant stars as in our earth ; and the 
same forces of water and fire operated millions of 
years ago as they do now. But, then, sin and suffer- 
ing are forcing themselves on our attention. From 
their very first appearance and all along, the lower 
animals have been liable to pain .and death. The 
two — the good and evil — are strangely mixed with 

1 Often did I wonder in my youth, when reading works on Natural 
Theology, how the writers contrived to overlook the obvious evils in 
the world. 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 65 

each other. These beautiful and bountiful laws are 
made to work mischief. Gravitation draws down a 
rock to crush us. Chemical affinity mixes poison to 
gender disease. On the other hand, there are skilful 
laws to bring good out of evil, alleviating disease, 
and purposely bringing it to an end. There is a sin- 
gular fitness in the structure and arrangement of the 
internal organs of our body ; but then, how liable 
are heart and brain to become deranged ! — a point 
fixed upon and used for his purposes by Comte, the 
founder of the Positive school. Sir John Herschell 
dwelt with evident delight on the formation of the 
eye, as showing such indubitable traces of design ; 
and no researches of science will ever be able to 
diminish the wonder excited by the adaptations of 
coats, humors, and muscles to the rays of light. On 
the other hand, Helmholtz alleges that there are de- 
fects in that organ which would not be allowed in the 
construction of an optic glass by a mechanic. 

What are we to make of this double class of facts, 
so mixed up with each other ? Two theories have 
been proposed, neither having much show of reason, 
— one, the Manichsean, that there is an Evil Spirit, 
independent of God and contending with God. This 
is inconsistent with the idea of God, — the One, the 
Self-existent, the Creator and Source of all things, — 
and of what we see of the unity of the world. An- 
other supposition, has been started, that, before man 
appeared, our earth was the scene of war between 
God and devils, who are seeking to regain their old 
ascendancy. No fact can be adduced in favor of this 

5 



66 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

theory, which is a mere fancy, with nothing to sup- 
port it. So we may turn to the account which is 
given in the Word of God, to learn whether it is 
in accordance with the twofold phenomenon. 

According to Scripture, moral and physical evil has 
intruded into our world. We have traces of it before 
man was created, in the fall of angelic beings who 
are ready to tempt Adam and Eve. From the very 
day when man fell, we have a contest going on in our 
world. I do not assert, with some of our older di- 
vines, that pain and death came upon the lower ani- 
mals because Adam fell. But it is a noticeable fact 
that death has reigned all along since living beings 
appeared, even over those who have " not sinned after 
the similitude of Adam's transgression," on that earth 
on which man has sinned. Our world is thus of a 
piece in itself, and its history is consistent through- 
out. The science of these later years is ever speak- 
ing of the struggle for existence in ages past, and of 
the weaker races giving way before the stronger. Our 
world is still, as it has ever been, a scene of struggle 
and of warfare. All history and our whole experience 
testify to this effect. It is the account given through- 
out the Scriptures. 

There are very staggering statements made by our 
savans, in the present day, as to the impressions left 
on the mind by scientific research. An age or two 
ago, they talked of the stability of nature ; they dwelt 
on the calming effect produced by the study of its un- 
varying laws, and the evidence which these furnished 
of the pure benevolence of God. But all this is now 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 67 

changed. Comte delighted to point to members of 
the body, such as the eye and the liver, so liable to 
become deranged, and which he affirmed could easily 
have substituted for them organs not exposed to dis- 
ease. And now Helmholtz dwells remorsely on the 
imperfections found in the structure of the eye. Pro- 
fessor Tyndall, in his " Hours of Exercise in the High 
Alps," says that there is something chilling in the 
contemplation of those terrible forces whose integra- 
tion throughout the ages pulls down the Matterhorn. 
He speaks of the saddening effect produced by the 
aspect of the mountain from its higher crags, "hacked 
and hurt by time." " Hitherto the impression that it 
made was that of savage strength, but here we have 
inexorable decay." His language is as fierce as that 
of the fanatical (so-called) divines, who used to mag- 
nify the unsatisfactory feeling produced by the con- 
templation of nature, in order to shut up men into 
revelation. Mr. Fiske follows in the same strain (in 
Atlantic Monthly, March, 1876) : " There is little that 
is even intellectually satisfying in the awful picture 
which science shows us of giant worlds concentrating 
out of nebulous matter, developing, with prodigious 
waste of energy, into the theatres of all that is grand 
and sacred in spiritual endeavor, clashing and ex- 
ploding again into dead vapor-balls, only to renew the 
same wilful process without end, and a senseless bub- 
ble play of Titan forces, without life, love, and aspira- 
tion, brought forth only to be extinguished." 

But these same men shrink from the thought of 
being shut out from the aspirations which their sys- 



68 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

tern seems to scatter into atoms. Comte had no 
deity, but he invented a worship ; and Mr. Mill clings 
to the idea that there may be a religion without a 
God. Herbert Spencer finds it impossible to explain 
every thing, or even any thing, without calling in a 
great Unknown, represented by him as utterly inscru- 
table, but to which, notwithstanding, he is ever ascrib- 
ing power, — which comes, in fact, to be power, as an 
hypothesis to help him out of his speculative diffi- 
culties. This Unknowable is in fact his God, and this 
Unknown is to him the region of religion, — a region, I 
should think, as dark as the darkest grove of Pagan 
worship. Huxley — trained, it is understood, in a re- 
ligious home — wishes to retain a worship "chiefly of 
the silent sort." Tyndall follows the passage I have 
quoted, by expressing the hope that such yearnings 
and questionings are necessary " to the opening of a 
finer vision." In one of his prefaces to his Belfast 
Address, he says : " No atheistic reasoning can, I hold, 
dislodge religion from the heart of man : logic cannot 
deprive us of life, and religion is life to the religious : 
as an experience of consciousness, it is perfectly be- 
yond the assaults of logic." Mr. Fiske must follow his 
masters, and so he ends the passage I have quoted by 
urging that the human mind, however " scientific its 
training, must often recoil from the conclusion that 
this is all ; and there are moments when one feels 
that this cannot be all." And he tells us that there 
are moods in which a feeling, merely self-regarding, 
is lost sight of "in the feeling which associates a 
future life with some solution of the burdensome 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 69 

problem of existence." I believe that these men are 
sincere in their yearnings after a supernatural power 
and an immortal existence ; but the question arises, 
Can they hold to this belief in consistency with their 
scientific creed ? 

These hopes are liable to be, indeed must be, 
crushed in the vice of a terrible dilemma. The ques- 
tion must be answered, Are they or are they not the 
product of the atoms and material forces from which 
every thing is supposed to issue by evolution ? If 
they are, as they must be on the supposition that the 
theory is well founded, then it cannot be shown that 
they have any objective value whatever. There will 
be a constant and a painful contest in the breasts, 
or rather between the heads and hearts, of those older 
men trained religiously, and who would hold both 
their scientific creed and their hereditary faith. But 
the younger men, grounded from the first in the sci- 
entific doctrine, will look upon the feelings to which 
their leaders cling as ghosts, which enlightened men 
no longer believe in, as apparitions which must van- 
ish in the morning light. When these are gone, there 
is left only a void, felt to be dreary in the extreme, 
and with nothing to fill it. The pedigree of the feel- 
ings has been searched : they have been traced to mere 
fortuitous associations and heredity, and it is seen 
that their authority is gone. 

But the other side of the alternative may be taken, 
and it may be allowed that these aspirations are not 
the result of the physical forces. But, if so, then we 
have a proof of the utter insufficiency of that grand 



70 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

hypothesis which is supposed to explain every thing. 
We have got a residuum of which it can give no ac- 
count. The very existence of these faiths, the way 
in which they cleave to us, the fact that they cannot 
be dislodged, the very clinging to them on the part of 
the materialist, is an evidence that in man there is a 
higher nature than can be derived from the proto- 
plasm and the brutes, — a nature ever soaring upward 
to heaven, the place from which it came. 

Throughout the geological ages, there are new 
powers coming in ever and anon, and manifesting 
themselves by their action : there are life, sensation, 
consciousness, thought, reasoning, conscience. These 
always appear at the fit time, being adapted to the 
surroundings. Animals are introduced when there 
are plants for them to feed on. Man comes forth 
when there are cereals and cattle suited to his neces- 
sities. Possibly we may account, by the introduction 
of these new powers, for the fact, noticed by some of 
our most eminent American palaeontologists, that, on 
new orders of animals appearing, they assume a high 
form, — perhaps the very highest form of which they 
are capable, — and grow weaker instead of stronger, 
and finally disappear. It is a noteworthy circum- 
stance that in the historical period we have an analo- 
gous introduction of new and higher life. We have 
the antediluvian, the patriarchal, the Mosaic (priestly), 
and prophetical (kingly) dispensations, all growing out 
of each other, and rising to higher levels. These are 
all anticipatory, and have faces looking forward to 
One expected and waited for, and who appears in the 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 71 

fulness of time : the time which the prophecies had 
announced ; when the Jews, carrying with them the 
Greek version of the Old Testament, were found in 
every leading city, and by the very opposition they 
offered to the gospel raising a conflagration which 
called the attention of the Gentiles ; when the Greek 
literature and philosophy had stirred up thought 
and awakened a spirit of inquiry ; when men, sick 
of abounding corruption, were everywhere yearning 
for a deliverer and a new state of things ; and when 
the Roman empire had established a security which 
allowed the missionaries of the cross to travel with 
their gracious message. He comes from a sphere 
beyond our world, and is called the Logos, ratio et 
oratio, thought and expression, but becomes flesh ; 
thus combining the divine and human, the spiritual 
and material, calling himself the Son of Man, but 
claiming to be the Son of God. As a body " curi- 
ously wrought " had been prepared for the first man 
with his human spirit, so a body had been prepared for 
the second man with his Divine Spirit (" a body hast 
thou prepared me," Heb. x. 5), and this Divine na- 
ture is as adapted to the human body as the soul of 
man is to his body. His office is not to destroy, but 
to save, — to remove the derangement, to remedy the 
evil by himself submitting to it and overcoming it. 
" Having made peace through the blood of his cross, 
by him to reconcile all things unto himself ; by him, 
I say, whether they be things in earth or things in 
heaven." (Col. i. 20.) 

Contemporaneously with this manifestation of God, 



72 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

there is the introduction of a new and spiritual life. 
This, too, had been foretold by the prophets, and there 
had been anticipations of it in the spiritual character 
of the Old Testament saints. "And it shall come to 
pass that afterward I will pour my Spirit upon all 
flesh." Our Lord announced the coming of this 
blessed Agent. "Jesus stood and cried, saying, If 
any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He 
that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out 
of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But 
this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on 
him should receive, for the Holy Ghost was not yet 
given ; because that Jesus was not glorified." This 
gift proceeds on the completed work of Christ. It 
was realized when the day of Pentecost was fully 
come, and is so still in every revival of religion and 
the conversion of every sinner. This new life is a 
seed deposited, germinating, and bearing fruit, but 
a seed suited to the soil and drawing sustenance 
from it. It does not destroy or even supersede man's 
natural powers and appetences, but falls in among 
them, joins on to them, and purifies and elevates 
them. There is a continuance, an order, and a progres- 
sion in all this. " Howbeit, that was not first which 
is spiritual {irvevfjbaTiKov), but that which is natural 
(-^rwfciKov) ; and afterward that which is spiritual." 
" And so it is written the first Adam was made a liv- 
ing soul ; the second Adam was made a quickening 
spirit," where we may mark the advancement from 
the merely living soul {^rvxh v %G><ra>v) to the quick- 
ening spirit (irvevfia ^cooirocovv). (i Cor. xv. 44-49.) 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 73 

This heaven-descended stream will grow and expand 
till the Spirit is poured on all flesh. It thus ap- 
pears that the whole method of God's procedure is 
of a piece in both worlds, the natural and the 
spiritual, and from the beginning to the end, a con- 
stant introduction of new life, and this rising higher 
and higher. I have sometimes thought that geology, 
instead of being the most atheistical of all the sciences, 
may turn out to be the most religious, as letting us 
far into the knowledge of the past, and giving us 
glimpses — we can find no more — of the work which 
God doeth from the beginning to the end. 

In the days of Copernicus and Galileo, it was diffi- 
cult for old men to believe that the new doctrines 
could be reconciled with Scripture or with common 
observation. Bacon never accepted them, and Milton 
in a still later age adhered to the old theory. When 
Newton published his demonstration of the law of 
gravitation, there were pious men who were repelled 
by it; and the religious aspect of the doctrine had 
to be expounded by the celebrated mathematician 
Maclaurin. In these ages, as in this, there were 
anxious struggles in the breasts of many between 
their religion and their science. But the young peo- 
ple who sprang up, got ideas suited to the new views, 
and found them to be quite as consistent with religion 
as the old. God could be adored as sincerely by 
those who believed that the earth runs round the sun, 
as by those who were sure that their senses told them 
that the sun went round the earth. Those who be- 
lieve that the members of the body were " curiously 



74 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

wrought " and " fashioned," when as yet there was 
none of them, can as readily and heartily admire them 
and praise their Maker, as those who assert that God 
made them without a process. 

A great many young men, trained in Christian 
homes, and most anxious to retain their faith in the 
Bible, are convinced, on what they consider good evi- 
dence, that there is and must be a true doctrine of 
development. How are we to act towards them ? 
The teacher who has to deal with such has a very 
delicate part to act, and will require to exercise much 
wisdom, and, above all, to be swayed by the highest 
Christian grace. They tell you they have seen the 
gradation of fossils, and can, by the help of Professor 
Marsh's collections, trace the steps by which the ex- 
isting horse is derived from the old horse of the 
Eocene formation. How are those who are the guides 
of youth, but it may be not adepts in geology, to ad- 
vise them ? Are they to tell these youths that the 
Bible settles this question, and that our horse can- 
not have come from the fossil horse. Those so told 
will feel themselves in a most perplexing position, — 
obliged to abandon either their science or their reli- 
gion. Perhaps their grave seniors go on to let them 
know that, though they themselves are not scientific 
men, they can point to eminent geologists who deny 
the hypotheses of evolution. The youths will reply 
on the instant that these men are advanced in life, 
and will remind you that when Harvey published his 
doctrine of the circulation of the blood not a man 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 75 

under forty could be made to accept it ; and will go 
on to tell you that there is no naturalist under thirty, 
perhaps none under forty, who does not believe in a doc- 
trine of evolution ; and that all, or nearly all, Agassiz' 
pupils, including his own son, have abandoned the 
position of their master. And what can you say in 
reply ? If you denounce them, you will only harden 
them, and drive them away for ever from the Bible 
and from Christ. If young men have been made in- 
fidels by sceptical writers, they have also been made 
so by those who sit in Moses' seat, and have every 
quality recommended by the law — except charity. 1 
I dare not take the responsibility of driving things to 
this pass. I have, right or wrong, proceeded in a 
different manner and spirit. I have tried to act as 
our Lord did towards the Sadducees, with whom 
He dealt more gently than He did with the self- 
righteous and scowling Pharisees. I have said to 
them, " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor 
the power of God." I have endeavored to act as my 
illustrious instructor, Dr. Chalmers, acted, when he 
sought to reconcile astronomy and religion, not by re- 
jecting, but by accepting, all its truths sanctioned by 

1 President White has in his Warfare of Science brought forward 
an agglomeration (very undiscriminating and uncritical) of facts to 
show that religious men have opposed science, and been defeated. 
As no doubt he wishes to be impartial, I suggest that he gather 
a like bodv of facts to show that savans have used their science 
to put down religion, which stands as firm as ever. But all that 
would follow logically is, that there have been foolish defenders 
both of religion and of science. 



j6 GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. 

induction. I have proceeded as I am doing in these 
papers. I have shown them that there is really no 
proof of a doctrine of evolution carried to the extreme 
positions to which some have brought it. I have 
proven that the facts actually established do not 
authorize the irreligious conclusions which some have 
drawn from them. I have explained that Scripture, 
properly interpreted, does not sanction all the dogmas 
which divines have drawn from it, — that, for example, 
it does not countenance the statements in the old 
books of divinity, that there was no death among the 
lower animals till sin was committed. I have given 
examples of a very common occurrence, of both scien- 
tists and theologians, mingling wrong speculations 
with the facts of nature or the simple declarations of 
the Word. I have taken particular pains to show 
that some late discoveries in science have confirmed 
the declarations of Scripture. I remember that, when 
I was a boy, I was greatly troubled with the objection 
pressed on me by an old infidel, to whom I had been 
sent with a business message. "Oh," said he, "you 
believe the Bible, and are about to become a minister to 
preach it. That Bible opens with an absurdity and a 
contradiction. It makes light shine the first day, and 
the sun appear the fourth day." I was not able to 
answer the objection. It might have been difficult 
for any man to answer it at that time. Now the dif- 
ficulty can be removed by means of that very theory 
of Laplace which divines so abused, but which shows 
that there was light before the sun was condensed 



GEOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE. J J 

into a mass. " He that believeth shall not make 
haste." " Unto the upright there ariseth light in 
the darkness." 1 

The picture given in the following Paper is some- 
thing like that which would rise before the intelligent 
Christian as he looks to the acknowledged truths of 
science on the one hand, and the teachings of God's 
Word on the other ; in which it will be observed 
that there is a wonderful correspondence between 
the two, as we gaze on which we find the micro- 
scopical differences disappear. 

1 I believe this method has been blessed. My friends think that 
it was so when I followed it in Queen's College, Belfast. It seems 
to be so in Princeton, where I have been so aided by my colleagues. 
My lot has been cast in an age in which there has been for the 
past twenty years in Great Britain, and for the last five years in 
America, more infidelity in our colleges than in any time since the 
French Revolution, — it should be added that religion is in a much 
livelier state now than it was then. Every one who has looked into the 
matter knows how apt young men in our colleges, distinguished for 
their intellectual life, are in these days to lose their faith. Yet, here in 
Princeton, while we have had students troubled with doubts and fears, 
I have heard of only two young men who have left us avowed un- 
believers. With both I had dealings in kindness. One of them 
came back to our college publicly to defend the faith. The other, 
when I spoke of praying with him, told me that he did not believe 
in a God'to whom he could pray. Thanks to Him who holdeth in his 
hands the hearts of all men, both of these are at present in theolog- 
ical seminaries preparing for the Christian ministry. 



78 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 



PAPER IV. 

VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY COMBINED 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 1 

INVITE you into a temple in which are symbols 
■*■ and inscriptions fitted to instruct us as to the 
true character and history of our world. That temple 
is not made by human hands, but by Him who created 
the heavens and the earth. It is larger, grander, and 
yet simpler, than the rock-cut temples of India, than 
the columnar vistas of Egypt, than the cathedrals 
raised by the piety of the Middle Ages. Some of 
the great passes in the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas 
bear some likeness to it in length and height, but 
they are bare and sterile, whereas this is covered on 
both sides with figures full of meaning. At the 
grand entrance are two forms which arrest the atten- 
tion. The one on the right consists of two tables of 
stone, representing law, — moral and natural. The 
one on the left is an altar, with flowers and fruit on 
it, and a bleeding lamb. Here the vista, bursts on 
our view, and extends on till the sides are lost in the 
dim distance ; but at the farthest end is an object 
which no distance can lessen — the Rock of ages, 

1 This is the Paper read by the author at the Meeting of the 
Evangelical Alliance in New York, 1873. 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 79 

with a throne set on it which cannot be moved, and 
the Ancient of Days seated on it, and in the midst 
" a Lamb as it had been slain ; " and midway between 
the entrance and the end is a cross lifted up and a 
meek sufferer stretched upon it, but with a halo round 
his head, and above him, spanning the arch, a rain- 
bow formed by the refraction of the pure white light, 
which streams from Him who dwelleth in light that 
is inaccessible to mortal eyes and full of glory. On 
each side of this extended gallery are symbolic figures, 
and these grow out of each other, and carry on a 
continued history from the past into the future on- 
ward into eternity. The great limners of the world 
are busily employed in drawing the pictures in this 
palace of the great King. I am to engage you for a 
little while in looking at them and reading the in- 
scriptions. 

1. The Religions Side. They have been written 
" at sundry times and in divers parts " by holy men 
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The first 
inscription that meets our eye is " In the beginning" 
(iv apyr)), — the word used by the old Greek philoso- 
phers when they were inquiring after the origin and 
principle of all things. How far back into the remote 
this carries us we cannot tell, but then " God created 
the heavens and the earth." We then see a brooding 
darkness, but it is a cloud of seeds from which the 
worlds are formed. " The earth was without form 
and void," but the wind of the Spirit blows upon it. 
and a voice is heard, " Let there be light," and light 
appears, and henceforth there is systematic order : 



80 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

there is development in order or order in develop- 
ment, and at the close of each day or period God 
declares " all things to be very good." As yet there 
is no sun or moon ; but there is rotating evening and 
morning, and the evening and the morning constitute 
the first day, — we know not of what length, for the 
clock of time is not yet set up, and the word day 
often means epoch in Scripture. In the second day 
there is the rising of the aerial and the sinking of the 
fluid. In the third day the sea is divided from the 
land ; on the same day life appears, and has a devel- 
oping power in it, "for the earth brought forth grass, 
and herb yielding seed after his kind, whose seed is 
in itself after his kind." On the fourth two solid 
lights appear, and become the rulers and dividers of 
time. When the fifth day rises out of the night, we 
see the waters bringing forth the swarming creatures, 
and we have fishes, reptiles, and fowls ; all with a 
power of evolution, for the waters bring forth after their 
kind, and every winged fowl after his kind, and they 
are enjoined to multiply and fill the waters in the sea 
and the earth. A sixth day dawns, and we see mam- 
mals, larger and smaller, and beasts, all after their 
kind ; and in this epoch appears a nobler creature 
made after the image of God, and with the command 
to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. 
This was the special work of Elohim, the one God 
with a plural nature, who, on finishing the creation, 
leaves the living creatures to develop by the powers 
with which he has endowed them. 

Another vision joins on, and we have, not Elohim, 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 8 1 

but the Lord Jehovah, the law-giver, the covenant- 
maker ; and there is exhibited to us the relation in 
which man stands to him. Man is represented as 
formed out of the dust of the ground, but with a 
divine breath breathed into him ; he is put under law, 
with a promise of life and a threatening of death. 
We now come to the most mysterious of all the 
records. A tempter, indicating an earlier fall, sud- 
denly intrudes, and he uses the beast of the field and 
the lower passions as his instruments ; and hence- 
forth man exhibits devilish propensities of pride and 
rebellion, on the one hand, and animal propensities 
of appetite and lust on the other ; and there is sin 
propagating itself, actual sin developing from original 
sin as a seed, and man driven into a world where are 
thorns and thistles ; and the multiplication of the 
race is with sorrow, and man has to earn his bread 
with the sweat of his face, and his body has to return 
to the dust from which it was taken. 

There now appears a figure with an inscription 
containing the whole history of mankind in epitome. 
You see a Being possessed evidently of superhuman 
power, but with a truly human nature, having his 
heel bitten by a serpent, on whose head he sets his 
foot and crushes it for ever. The attached writing 
is, " I wilhput enmity between thee and the woman, 
and between thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy 
head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Henceforth there 
are two seeds, and each develops after its kind, and they 
contend, and must contend, till the good gains the vic- 
tory. A seed — not seeds, as of many, but seed, as of 

6 



82 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

one — is developed from the woman, but by a heav- 
enly power, the Holy Ghost, who brought form out 
of the formless at creation ; and this personage is 
represented as suffering, as having his heel bruised, 
and in his suffering destroying the power of evil. 
Henceforth our world is a scene of contest. Man is 
warring with the unwilling soil, with privation, disap- 
pointment, loss, disease, and death ; one man contend- 
ing with another because of conflicting interests and 
passions ; one race and nation fighting with another ; 
and a large portion of human history is a history of 
war. To restrain excessive wickedness, the earth is 
visited with a flood, — as geologists tell us it had often 
been before, — but animal pairs are preserved to con- 
tinue the races, and the rainbow is made to give 
assurance to the terrified fathers that waters will no 
more cover the earth. The purpose of God is ful- 
filled in the scattering of men ; but the people, wher- 
ever they go, propagate the evil, and change the 
incorruptible God into an image made like to cor- 
ruptible man, and " to birds and four-footed beasts, 
and creeping things." To preserve a seed who may 
know the truth, a special man and a special race is 
set apart. Out of this seed comes the father both of 
history and poetry, who, in language of unsurpassed 
simplicity and grandeur, has described creation, and 
written the inflexible law in the granite of Sinai, and, 
himself a prophet, spoken of a greater Prophet to 
come. Their greatest poet, himself a great warrior, 
portrays the contest between the good and the evil 
going on in the world in warlike imagery ; and, feel- 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 83 

ing that he himself is not the man to build the spiritual 
temple because his hands have been imbrued in blood, 
points ever to a King who " in his majesty rides 
prosperously because of truth, meekness, and righteous- 
ness." There follows a succession of prophets, each 
with his vision and his parable ; and the grandest of 
them, whose sentences flow like a river descending 
from the heights of heaven to water the plains of 
earth, speaks of him as wounded, bruised, dying and 
in the grave, but seeing the fruit of the travail of his 
soul, and extending his dominion till it 'covers the 
whole earth as the waters do the channel of the sea. 
Contemporaneous with these, we have typical per- 
sonages — prophets, priests, and kings, — with their 
faces shining with light as they look forward to the One 
suspended on the cross, and beyond to the throne of 
God. In the middle of the ages, that great Person 
appears, passing through suffering to conquest, fight- 
ing with sin and subduing it, connecting heaven and 
earth as by a ladder, and as a rainbow spanning the 
world. 

Beyond the central figure a new life appears. God 
comes forth as creator the first time since he rested 
after creating the heavens and the earth. Just as in 
the prehistoric ages there had appeared a plant life, 
and an animal life, and an intellectual life, and a moral 
life, so now we have a spiritual life : it is the dispen- 
sation of the Spirit. Those who have sat for ages in 
darkness now see a great light. A new people come 
forth, not dwelling in a separate locality, but scat- 
tered among all people, like salt to preserve, like seed 



84 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

to propagate, the life all over the world. With that 
spiritual life come other forms of good, such as art, 
and civilization, and widening comforts, and the culti- 
vation of the intellect, and the refining of the feelings. 
But the soil has still to be ploughed and harrowed in 
order to yield seed and fruit ; the spiritual forces 
have to meet and overcome obstacles ; and every 
good cause before it succeeds has to produce a martyr, 
out of whose ashes a new life proceeds. Not only 
so, but there is a contest in every heart ; "the flesh 
lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the 
flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other." 
The cause moves on, as the light comes from the sun 
in vibrations, as the tides come up upon the land, — 
advancing and receding, but on the whole advancing. 
In the last symbolic book, we hear a succession of 
trumpets sounding to call men to the battle, and see 
vials poured out to destroy the seeds of evil and 
purify the atmosphere. Many pass to and fro, and 
knowledge is increased ; agencies for good are multi- 
plied, and the kingdom extends till it spreads over 
the whole earth, which has rest for a thousand years, 
— we may suppose a day for a year. Beyond this 
the vision becomes dim from the distance, but we 
see the old adversary loosed for a little while, and the 
earth burned with fire, and the dazzling bright throne 
of judgment set up, and the God-man upon it, and 
every one giving an account of the deeds done in the 
body, whether they have been good or whether they 
have been evil ; and then a separation, these descend- 
ing by their own weight into their own place of 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION 85 

blackness, and those carried up to heaven by their 
attraction to God, where they join in the song, " Sal- 
vation to our God that sitteth on the throne, and to 
the Lamb." 

2. The Scientific Side. Here, as on the other side, 
we have a body of men busily employed in drawing 
figures and carving inscriptions, all to throw light on 
the past and present of our world. They are left to 
their native powers, and have to work by observation ; 
they are not kept from error by any special guidance, 
and much that they write is laid in colors which fade, 
or in false colors which require to be blotted out by 
those who come after. Still much remains, and shall 
remain for ever, chiselled in the rock and never to be 
effaced, and this is growing and accumulating. 

We have, first, lawgivers, who, finding that men 
are prone to evil, have proclaimed laws more or less 
perfect to secure obedience. Then there are moral- 
ists, from Socrates downward, inscribing on that wall 
what they have found written on their hearts, and 
which they regard, if only they read it aright, as a 
transcript of the holy nature and the supreme will of 
God. Alongside of them you may notice the broad- 
browed philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle on- 
ward, speculating on fate and chance, and the relation 
of the universe to God, and demonstrating that man's 
soul has a conscious unity and personality of which 
it can never be deprived. The next group consists 
of historians who have given us lively narratives of 
the great deeds of our world, of the sacrifices which 
men have made for kindred and for country, but who 



86 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

have also to record enormous crimes, political feuds 
and wars which have deluged the earth with blood. 
Next and more influential are those who express pop- 
ular feeling, and have told what this world of men 
and women is, and have enshrined their thoughts in 
verse, that they may be caught more easily and 
remembered longer. Let us notice the topics of 
which they treat. The oldest of them, never sur- 
passed for natural strength, has sung of the wrath of 
Achilles, and the evil thus wrought. Another, full 
of grace, has sung of arms, and of a hero fleeing from 
a burning city, and crossing a stormy sea to found an 
empire. In a later age we see one who, though 
blind, has seen farther than other men, and has 
painted demoniacal pride, Paradise Lost and Para- 
dise Regained. Another hand has taken the lyre, 
and, with old Horace and modern songsters and 
satirists, has delineated the loves and hatreds, the 
hopes and disappointments, the joys and sorrows, the 
aspirations and foibles, which agitate men's bosoms. 
A third class, led by our high-browed dramatist, have 
exhibited on a stage what they believe to be the 
swaying motives of rich and poor, and have let us 
into the secrets of the working of ambition, passion, 
jealousy, pride, vanity, envy, revenge, caprice, fear, 
despair. The poet of the common people, in describ- 
ing their joys, often sensual and mad, comes to the 
conclusion that " man is made to mourn." Romancers 
of these late years are taking up the same work, and 
are spinning tales which exhibit the strength and 
weakness of our nature — yearning affections, blighted 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION 87 

hopes, cruel betrayals — illustrated by seduction and 
murder. All of these artists describe this earth as a 
strangely mixed scene, with hills and hollows, with 
lakes sleeping in visible repose or rent by storms, 
with peaceful valleys and terrible gullies, with streams 
flowing gently and then pouring over fearful cataracts, 
with an ocean now inviting us to repose on its 
bosom, and anon tossing off men and vessels like 
seaweed. 

But let us specially look at the grand truths in- 
scribed by the expounders of science, as you see them 
there with their instruments for weighing and meas- 
uring, and their laborious calculations. On the relig- 
ious side every thing was ascribed to God, proceeding 
orderly : " Thou hast established the earth and it 
abideth. They continue this day according to thine 
ordinances ; for all are thy servants." A somewhat 
different but not inconsistent view is given of the 
same objects on the scientific side, where every thing 
is ascribed to what is called "law," which, however, 
when properly understood, implies a lawgiver. So 
these men, consciously or unconsciously, are unfold- 
ing to our view the plan of the great Creator. On 
this" side of the hall of science, you see inscribed : 
first, mathematical figures, such as squares, triangles, 
circles, spirals, and other sections of the cone ; and it 
turns out that these regulate the forms and move- 
ments of objects in the heavens and in the earth, and 
are made to do so by a God who, as Plato says, geom- 
etrizes. Then you see science investigating inanimate 
nature, and showing that all the physical forces are 



88 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

modifications of one and the same force. Now it is 
seeking to discover the order and progression of ani- 
mated beings, of plants and animals. It has shown 
that there are geological epochs : first, an azoic 
period ; then plants, marine and terrestrial ; then the 
lower creatures with animal life ; then fishes, reptiles, 
fowls, quadrupeds ; and, finally, man. 

In looking at these phenomena, men discover every- 
where development or evolution. It appears in inani- 
mate nature, — in suns, planets, and moons being 
evolved out of an original matter, in a way which 
implies that the earth is older than the sun, and must 
have existed for ages, and had light shining upon it 
before the sun took his solid form. It is a character- 
istic of organized beings to produce others after their 
kind. Those who view development in the proper 
light see in it only a form or manifestation of law. 
Gravitation is a law of contemporaneous nature, ex- 
tending over all bodies simultaneously, — over sun, 
moon, and stars the most remote. Development is a 
law of successive nature, and secures a connection 
between the past and the present, and I may add the 
future, securing a unity, and it may be a progression, 
from age to age. It is merely an exhibition of order 
running through successive ages, as the other is of 
order running through coexisting objects. 

But at this point difficulties and disputes arise. Is 
development so restricted that the plant or animal 
produces an offspring only after its kind, the lichen 
producing only the lichen, and the lily only the lily, 
and the oak only the oak, and the worm only the 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 89 

worm, and the bee only the bee, and the horse only 
the horse ? Or may not development be so extended 
as to imply, in new circumstances and under new 
conditions, a modification of kinds — that is, new 
species — and an advance from age to age from lower 
to higher forms ? Some maintain that there is no 
power in nature to change species, and that when a 
new species appears it must be by an immediate fiat 
of God acting independently of all natural agents. 
Others hold that there may be powers in nature — 
religious men say conferred by God — which gradu- 
ally raise species into higher forms by aggregation 
and selection. I am not sure that religion has any 
interest in holding absolutely by the one side or other 
of this question, which it is for scientific men to settle. 
I am not sure that religion is entitled to insist that 
every species of insect has been created by a special 
fiat of God, with no secondary agent employed. 

But in prosecuting these investigations science 
comes to walls of adamant, which will not fall down 
at its command, and which, if it tries to break through, 
will only prostrate it, and cause it to exhibit its weak- 
ness before the world. (1) It cannot develop with- 
out a matter to develop from, and it cannot tell 
where this original matter came from. This matter 
must have properties : what are these properties ? 
and whence ? The impression left by the statement 
of some is that if we only had this original matter, 
every thing else could be accounted for by evolution. 
But (2) we cannot, apart from a designing mind, 
account for that combination, that organization of 



90 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

agencies — mechanical, electrical, chemical, vital — 
which produces development. (3) It cannot say how 
animal sensation or feeling came in. (4) It cannot 
tell when or how instinct came in, how or when intel- 
ligence appeared, and affection and pity and love, and 
the discernment of good and evil. (5) In particular, 
it cannot render any account of the production of 
man's higher endowments, his powers of abstracting, 
generalizing, and reasoning, from the individual objects 
presented to him, of discovering necessary truth, and 
the obligation of virtue. Science has not found these 
in the star-dust, nor were they in the ascidian, the 
fish, the monkey : how, then, did man get them, or 
rather, whence came man as possessed of them ? 
Science, at all these places, comes to chasms which 
it cannot fill up. It has no facts whatever to support 
its theories, and is obliged to acknowledge that it has 
none ; and as to the hypotheses which it calls in, 
they do not even seem to explain the essential facts, 
the appearance of new powers or agencies not known 
to be at work before. 

But meanwhile, and as it is poring into these things, 
it is obliged to look at a set of phenomena unknown 
to or overlooked by the older physicists and natural- 
ists — has, as it looks to animated beings, come in 
view of a conflict of which it can give no account, and 
of a manifest evil. It speaks of worlds coming out 
of star-dust, of worlds shattered into fragments and 
their materials scattered into space ; and in regard to 
our earth, of upheavals, of sinking of land, and the 
submergence of all living beings on it ; of floods, 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION 91 

of denudations, of volcanoes, of icebergs, and long 
periods of shivering cold. All these might not be 
evils, but then it speaks of what is and must be an 
evil, — of the existence of pain. When living beings 
appear, it cannot tell how, it is obliged to speak of a 
struggle for existence, the stronger devouring the 
weaker, and innumerable diseases preying on the 
animal frame, of individuals dying, and races perish- 
ing from want of sustenance or amid overwhelming 
convulsions. When man appears, it cannot tell how, 
but on a scene evidently prepared for him, he carries 
the seeds of disease in his very person, and he has to 
suffer pain of body and torture of mind. Around 
him are storms to destroy and disappointments cross- 
ing his path, and within are selfishness and craving 
lusts and repinings and passions, which war against 
each other, and war against the soul. 

True, there are in all these objects law and order 
and beneficence, obvious, and pressing themselves on 
the notice. Forces, blind in themselves, are made by 
their combination to produce the most perfect mathe- 
matical figures. Beauty appears everywhere, — in sky 
and earth, in planet and plant. Every organ of the 
animal frame is good in itself, and liable to accomplish 
its evident purpose. There is order in star and sun 
and earth, but order coming out of disorder. It is 
beauty in flowers, in young man and maiden, coming 
out of dust and returning to dust ; we see it in that 
foliage, so beautiful even when it is fading : does not 
the father feel it when he commits the body of his son 
to the grave, " dust to dust, ashes to ashes " ? Man 



92 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

has high aspirations, but it is only to feel how far he 
falls beneath them. All these are facts, — quite as 
much so as the movement of the planets in elliptic 
orbits, as the laws of development in the vegetable 
and animal kingdoms. The proudest thinkers, as they 
are brought face to face with these facts, are obliged 
to acknowledge that they cannot discover a final cause 
in many of the most common agents of nature ; as, 
for instance, in the derangement to which every organ 
of the frame is liable, and in the parasites which dwell 
in and feed on the bodies of all our noblest animals. 
The microscope shows us how exquisitely they are 
formed, but all to inflict the more excruciating pain. We 
may apologize for some of these things, but we cannot 
explain them, — for instance, the existence of incura- 
ble sorrow and madness. .Physiologists know that the 
organs of the body — the eye, the stomach, the liver, 
the brain — might have been so constructed as not to 
be liable to disease and pain, to which they are ex- 
posed, not by accident, but by their very nature and 
structure. Combined science, as it looks into the 
future, is obliged to tell lis that the world, and all that 
is therein, shall first have its heat exhausted, and then, 
in the disintegration, shall be burned with fire ; and 
what is to be the new order of things which is to issue 
out of this elemental fire it cannot tell. 

Now this is, in fact, the sum of what science has 
been able to say about our world : Our cosmos rises 
out of dust, is formed into beautiful shapes by warring 
powers, becomes order and progressive order, and 
ends in dissolving heat. Our earth comes out of a 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 



93 



cloud and ends in a conflagration. The highest being, 
as he enters it, makes known his presence by a cry, 
and ends his march through it in the grave. Surely, 
in all this, while there is much in the evident order 
and beneficence to elevate, there is not a little to awe 
and to humble us. The profoundest thinkers feel 
that they have come here to an unknown power be- 
hind and beneath all ; and are impelled, under a 
choking feeling, to cry out, like the dying Goethe, 
for light, and for windows to be opened to let it 
in. 

Meanwhile, that other and higher law, the moral 
law — the law written on the heart — has something 
very important to utter, and it pronounces it in the 
name of God, the law-giver. It affirms of itself that 
it is unbending as stone, and yet finds that man 
has broken it. It points emphatically to a judgment 
to come, — it cannot say where or when, but certain 
to come, — as certain as that there is a law, an eternal 
law, and a God to guard it. The scene closes with 
each one placed before that bar to give an account 
of the 'deeds done in the body, whether they have 
been good, or whether they have been evil ; and there 
it leaves him, in the midst of the conflagration of 
worlds, with undying matter taking new shapes, and 
a soul — certainly as undying as that matter — ready to 
be consigned to its own place of light or of darkness. 

3. The Reconciliation. — Having taken a cursory 
glance at each of the sides of this rock-cut gallery, 
let us now look back upon the two. We see, in 
a general way that there is a correspondence be- 



94 VIEW OF OUR WO RID GIVEN BY 

tween them. In both we have moral law set forth : 
in the one by the conscience ; in the other by the 
commands and prohibitions in Eden, by the tables 
of stone on Mount Sinai, and by the Sermon on 
the Mount in the New Testament. But there is 
this important difference : the one tells us that the 
law has been broken, and in proof points to the wick- 
edness in the world, and the guilty remorse which 
agitates men's bosoms, but reveals no way by which 
the sin can be forgiven ; whereas the other, while it 
declares that sin has been committed, clearly makes 
known a way by which the sinner may be reconciled 
to God. Both reveal order in the world : the one as 
appointed by God ; the other as discovered by man. 
In both we have progression in the divine workman- 
ship, and the order, as Dr. Guyot has shown, is very 
much the same. 1 The Bible says that, after man was 
made, God rested from creation ; and Dr. Dana assures 
us that since man appeared geology does not disclose 
a single new species of plant or animal. It is surely 
a curious circumstance that this picture of the forma- 
tion of our earth was drawn upwards of three thousand 
years before geology started, and has continued un- 
changed amid the shiftings of science. The inspired 
record tells us, what anthropology confirms, that man 
has a twofold nature, — a body formed out of the dust 
of the ground, and a spirit after the image of God 
breathed into him. Nor is there any contradiction 
as to chronology. For, first, geology has no clock 

1 See Evangelical Alliance Conference, 1873, p. 276. See also 
Dawson's " Nature and the Bible," Lect. III. 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 95 

to tell us the time, — what it reveals is not absolute, 
but relative. It tells us that a certain epoch must 
have been before another epoch ; but its deductions 
are very uncertain as to how far back any one epoch — 
say the glacial epoch — carries us. These uncertain- 
ties have been increased by the discoveries lately made 
by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr. Carpenter, of crea- 
tures now living in the deep seas, which geologists, if 
they had found them as fossils, would at once have 
ascribed to a much earlier epoch. And as to Script- 
ure, it contains no inspired chronology of early history ; 
what passes as such is drawn out of Bible genealogies 
by fallible men, and drawn out of imperfect data, for 
Jewish scholars tell us that these genealogies were 
never understood as being complete ; and the gene- 
alogies, when summed up, give us, in the Hebrew 
text, 1656 years between the Creation and the Flood, 
whereas the Septuagint gives us 2262 years, and the 
Samaritan text only 1307 years. 

At this stage, the scriptural record discloses a new 
and strange phenomenon to appear in the universe of 
God : it 'furnishes a glimpse of an early rebellion ; for 
one comes on the scene to tempt the first human pair. 
At the corresponding period, science gives intimations 
of a struggle in which we see warring elements, and a 
gradual evolution of planets and satellites, the sun 
consolidated into a centre, and capable of being seen 
from the earth ; and when living beings appear — 
science cannot tell how — we find animals devouring 
one another, the strong, with their terrible fangs and 
jaws, prevailing ; the weak disappearing through dis- 



96 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

ease and death, accompanied with brute passion and 
pain. History and biography come in to tell us how- 
much of human activity has been spent in feuds among 
individuals, families, and nations. Poetry, and at a later 
date romance, take up the theme, and they delineate 
the hopes and fears and passions of our nature, and 
our bosoms beat responsive to their descriptions. We 
feel that the Scriptures speak profoundly and truly 
when they say : " For the earnest expectation of the 
creature (or creation) waiteth for the manifestation of 
the sons of God. For the creature was made subject 
to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath 
subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself 
also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption 
into the glorious liberty of the children of God, for we 
know that the whole creation (creature) groaneth in 
pain together until now" (Rom. viii. 19, 22). The same 
apostle describes the internal struggle (Rom. vii. 14- 
20) : " To will is present with me ; but how to per- 
form that which is good I find not." 

Our world is not what some describe it. It is not 
what the rationalist would have it, — a peaceful land- 
scape, with nothing but order and beauty. It forces 
upon our observation scenes which the expounders of 
natural theology and your Unitarians, who, discarding 
inspiration, would fall back on natural religion, are 
unwilling to look at ; and the opponents of religion, 
natural and revealed, are right, when, they say that it 
is difficult or impossible to discover final cause in 
every thing, — in the liability of every member of the 
body to disease, in pain often amounting to anguish, 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 97 

in sorrow which refuses to be comforted, in despair 
issuing in suicide. The last of the great series of 
German speculators, who began with Leibnitz and 
was continued by Kant and Hegel, terminated with 
Schopenhauer and Hartmann, who have dwelt on 
the natural evils of terrible power and prevalence 
found everywhere in the world ; and the' speculative 
philosophy which began with optimism has ended 
with pessimism, audaciously avowed, and gaining not 
a few followers. The great living speculator of Eng- 
land, belonging to a very different school, — to that of 
observation, — maintains that this world gives evi- 
dence of nothing beyond itself, except a great unknown 
out of which all things have come. Nor is our world 
what the sentimentalist dreams of, all sunshine and 
hope, all gratification and gayety. We live in a world 
where " day and night alternate ; " where the evening 
and the morning constitute the first day, and the 
second day, and so on ; where every man goes accom- 
panied with his shadow, which he cannot leave behind 
nor overleap ; and every one, sooner or later, will have 
to taste of bereavements, ingratitude, ill-usage ; and 
carries within him a fire of fear, lust, and envy, ready 
to burst into a conflagration and burn up the soul, as 
fire is to burn up our world. Look now at this picture 
and now at that, and say whether they do not answer 
as fo.ce answereth to face in a glass, differing from 
each other only as one twin-brother differeth from 
another. 

All that science has demonstrated, all that theism 
has argued, of the order, of the final cause and benev- 

7 



98 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

olent purpose in the world is true, and cannot be set 
aside. Every natural law — mechanical, chemical, 
and vital — is good. Every organ of the body, when 
free from disease, is good. There is certainly the 
most exquisite adaptation in the eye, however we 
may account for its formation, and for the numerous 
diseases which seize upon it. Agassiz has shown, by 
an induction of facts reaching over the whole history 
of the animal kingdom, that there is plan in the suc- 
cession of organic life. " It has the correspondence 
of connected plan. It is just that kind of resemblance 
in the parts — so much and no more — as always 
characterizes intellectual work proceeding from the 
same source. It has that freedom of manifestation, 
that independence, which characterizes the work of 
mind, as compared with the work of law. Sometimes 
in looking at the epos of organic life in its totality, 
carried on with such care and variety, and even play- 
fulness of expression, one is reminded of the great 
conception of the poet or musician, where the under- 
tone of the fundamental harmony is heard beneath all 
the diversity of rhythm or song." All this is true, 
but all this is not all the truth. What the older sci- 
entific men did not see : what Newton did not see as 
he looked to the perfect order of the heavens ; what 
Cuvier did not see, when he dwelt so fondly on the 
teleology seen in every part of the animal structure ; 
what Paley did not see, when he pointed out the 
design in every bone, in every joint and muscle ; what 
Chalmers did not see, when in his astronomical dis- 
courses he sought to reconcile the perfection of the 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 



99 



heavens with the need of God's providing a Saviour 
for men, — has been forced on our notice, as natural- 
ists have been searching into animal life, with its 
struggles and its sufferings. There is order in our 
world, but it is order subordinating conflicting powers. 
There is goodness, but goodness overcoming evil. 
There is progression, but progression like that of the 
ship on the ocean, amid winds and waves. There is 
the certainty of peace, but after a battle and a victory. 
There may be seen everywhere an overruling power 
in bringing good out of evil ; so that Schopenhauer, 
in noticing the evil, has noticed only a part, and this 
only a subordinate part, of the whole ; and this to be 
ultimately swallowed up. 

While they have seen the phenomenon, these men 
have not known what to make of it. It is useless to 
tell the younger naturalists that there is no truth in 
the doctrine of development ; for they know that 
there is truth, which is not to be set aside by denun- 
ciation. Religious philosophers might be more profit- 
ably employed in showing them the religious aspects 
of the doctrine of development ; and some would be 
grateful to any who would help them to keep their 
old faith in God and the Bible with their new faith in 
science. But we must at the same time point out 
the necessary limits of the doctrine, and rebuke those 
unwise because conceited men who, when they have 
made a few observations in one department of physi- 
cal nature, being commonly profoundly ignorant of 
every other — particularly of mental and moral science 
— imagine that they can explain every thing by the 



IOO VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

one law of evolution. But there is a large and impor- 
tant body of facts which these hypotheses cannot 
cover. Development implies an original matter with 
high endowments. _ Whence the original matter ? It 
is acknowledged, by its most eminent expounder, 
that evolution cannot account for the first appearance 
of life. Greatly to the disappointment of some of his 
followers, Darwin is obliged to postulate three or four 
germs of life created by God. To explain the contin- 
uance of life, he is obliged to call in a pangenesis, or 
universal life, which is just a vague phrase for that 
inexplicable thing, life, and life is just a mode of 
God's action. Plants, the first life that appeared, 
have no sensation. How did sensation come in ? 
Whence animal instinct ? Whence affection, — the 
affection of a mother for her offspring, of a patriot 
for his country, of a Christian for his Saviour ? 
Whence intelligence ? Whence discernment of duty 
as imperative ? It is felt by all students of mental 
science that Darwin is weak when he seeks to account 
for these high ideas and sentiments. Careful, as 
being so trained, in noticing the minutest peculiarities 
of plants and animals, and acquainted as he has made 
himself with the appetites and habits of animals, 
he seems utterly incapable of understanding man's 
higher capacities and noble aspirations, of seeing how 
much is involved in consciousness, in personal iden- 
tity, in necessary truth, in unbending rectitude ; he 
explains them only by overlooking their essential 
peculiarities. It is allowed that geology does not 
show an unbroken descent of the lower animals from 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION. IOI 

the higher ; on the contrary, it is ever coming to 
breaks, and, in the case of a number of tribes of the 
lower animals, the more highly organized forms ap- 
pear first, and are followed by a degeneracy. It is 
acknowledged that in the historical ages we do not 
see such new endowments coming in by natural law 
— the plant becoming animal, or the monkey becom- 
ing man. That matter should of itself develop into 
thought is a position which neither observation nor 
reason sanctions. Science gives no countenance to 
it. Common-sense turns away from it. Philosophy 
declares that this would be an effect without a cause 
adequate to produce it. 

But these inquiries have brought us face to face 
with a remarkable body of facts. The known effects 
in the world — the order, beauty, and beneficence — 
point to the nature and character of their cause ; and 
this, not an unknown God, as Herbert Spencer main- 
tains, but a known God. " The invisible things of 
God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
being understood from the things that are made, even 
his eternal power and Godhead." But in the very 
midst of the good there is evil : the good is shown in 
removing the evil, in relieving suffering, in solacing 
sorrow, and conquering sin. Evil, properly speaking, 
cannot appear till there are animated beings ; and as 
soon as sentient life appears there is pain, which is 
an evil. It does look as if in the midst of arrange- 
ments contrived with infinite skill there is some 
derangement. It may turn out that the Bible doc- 
trine, so much ridiculed in the present day, of 



102 VIEW OF OUR WORLD GIVEN BY 

there being a Satan, an adversary, opposed to God 
and good, has a deep foundation in the nature of 
things, even as it has a confirmation in our experi- 
ence, without and -within us, where we find that when 
we would do good evil is present with us. The old 
Persians had a glimpse of the truth, probably derived 
from a perverted tradition, and confirmed by felt ex- 
perience, when they placed in the universe a power 
opposed to God ; but they misunderstood the truth 
when they made that power coeval and coequal with 
God ; and the old Book, which some are regarding as 
antiquated, may be telling the exact truth when it tells 
us that sin is a rebellion to be subdued, and in the 
end everlastingly cast out. How curious, should it 
turn out that these scientific inquirers, so laboriously 
digging in the earth, have, all unknown to themselves, 
come upon the missing link which is partially to recon- 
cile natural and revealed religion ! Our English Titan 
is right when he says that at the basis of all phenom- 
ena we come to something unknown and unknowable. 
He would erect an altar to the unknown God, and Pro- 
fessor Huxley would have the worship paid there to 
be chiefly of the silent sort. But a Jew, born at Tar- 
sus, no mean city in Greek philosophy, and brought 
up at the feet of Gamaliel, but subdued on the road 
to Damascus, by a greater teacher than any in Greece 
or Jewry, told the men of Athens, who had erected an 
altar to the unknown God, "Whom ye ignorantly wor- 
ship, him I declare unto you." It does look as if 
later science had come in view of the darkness brood- 
ing on the face of the deep without knowing of the 



COMBINED SCIENCE AND RELIGION 103 

wind of the Spirit which is to dispel it, and divide the 
evil from the good, and issue in a spiritual creation, 
of which the first or natural creation was but a type. 

We do not as yet see all things reconciled between 
these two sides, — the side of Scripture and the side 
of science. But we see enough to satisfy us that the 
two correspond. It is the same world, seen under 
different aspects. We see in both the most skilful 
arrangement ; we are told in both of some derange- 
ment. Both reveal a known God ; both bring us to 
an unknown source of evil. But with the sameness 
there is a difference. The relation is not one of 
identity, but of correspondence ; like that of the earth 
to the concave sky by which it is canopied ; like that 
of the movement of the dial on earth to that of the sun 
in heaven. On this side is a wail from the deepest 
heart of the sufferer ; on that side there is consolation 
from the deepest heart of a comforter. On the one 
side is a cry like that of the young bird when it feels 
that it has wandered from its dam ; on the other, a 
call like that of a mother bird, as you may hear her in 
the evening, to bring her wandering ones under her 
wings. You may notice on that side a bier, with a 
corpse laid out upon it of a youth, the only son of his 
mother, and she a widow ; on that other side the 
same picture, but with one touching the bier, and the 
dead arises, and is in the embraces of his mother. 
On this side you see a sepulchre, and all men in the 
end consigned to it, and none coming out of it ; on 
the other side you see the great stone rolled away, 
and hear a voice : " He is not here ; He is risen." 



104 VIEW OF OUR WORLD. 

The grand reconciliation is effected by that central 
figure standing in the middle of the ages, by Him 
who has "made peace through the blood of His cross, 
by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, by Him, 
I say, whether they be things on earth, or things in 
Heaven." 

We have been able to take only a very cursory 
glance at the inscriptions on the wall of his temple. 
It is the aim of all learning, sacred and secular, 
to enable us to read and comprehend them. The 
superscription over the central figure was in letters of 
Greek and Latin and Hebrew, that the people of all 
countries may read it, and that we may proclaim it in 
every language. In the great contest going on with- 
out and within, every man must be on the one side or 
the other ; let us see that we be on the right side. 



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